The suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks was planning a second wave of attacks in the city but was killed days before he could carry them out, French authorities have said.
François Molins, the public prosecutor of Paris, told reporters on Tuesday that Abdelhamid Abaaoud intended to carry out a double suicide bombing targeting business district La Défense on 18 or 19 November.
Molins also said that immediately after the attacks, which left 130 dead and hundreds more injured, Abaaoud spent nearly two hours within a few hundred metres of the cafes which his accomplices had struck with bombs and automatic rifle fire. He also appeared to have been close to the Bataclan concert hall, where the heaviest loss of life occurred, even while police were still exchanging fire with terrorists inside.
Five days after the attacks, Abaaoud was among three people killed during a police raid on an apartment in St-Denis, a northern Paris suburb.
Police across Europe have intensified efforts to trace all those linked to the attacks. One key suspect is Salah Abdeslam, a Frenchman living in Brussels who is suspected of handling logistics for the operation and whose brother was among the suicide bombers.
Abdeslam fled from Paris to Belgium in the hours after the attack and has so far evaded a massive dragnet by local authorities.
On Tuesday German police launched a search for the 26-year-old after a possible sighting near Hanover, in the northwest, but found no evidence to confirm his presence or passage.
“The suspicion has not been confirmed. There is no indication that Salah Abdeslam was present in the area,” a spokesperson said.
Belgian police on Tuesday issued an international search warrant for another man, Mohamed Abrini, seen with Abdeslam two days before the attacks in Paris. Images taken from cameras at a petrol station showed the 30-year-old man, who authorities described as “dangerous and probably armed”, driving a car with Abdeslam on a motorway heading to the French capital.
Authorities have maintained a massive security operation in Brussels since alerting the population to a “serious and imminent” threat of terrorist attack over the weekend.
Schools, offices and shops have been shut, and much of the city’s public transport system suspended. Troops and armoured vehicles continue to guard stations and public places. Notices around the Belgian capital request inhabitants to call police if they have information about Abdeslam. Some measures are due to be lifted on Wednesday.
In France, searches and detentions continued. Authorities there questioned Jawad Bendaoud, the only person in France known to be facing potential terrorism charges directly linked to the attacks.
Bendaoud, described in local media as a “petty neighbourhood gangster”, was detained last week for providing the suspected ringleader of the attacks with the apartment in St-Denis. He has acknowledged in a television interview giving shelter to two people from Belgium but said he didn’t know who they were or what they planned.
However Molins told reporters Bendaoud “couldn’t possibly have been unaware ... that he was taking part in a terrorist organisation”.
Molins also said there was evidence that the unidentified third individual who died in the police raid on the St-Denis apartment had participated in the earlier attacks.
Though the man’s DNA did not match any on French records, it was identical to that found on an abandoned Kalashnikov assault rifle retrieved from a vehicle used by the attackers.
Molins insisted that the 26-year-old woman who died in the St Denis apartment, named as Hasna Aït Boulahcen, was fully aware that Abaaoud and the third man had participated in the attacks in Paris when she arranged a shelter for them four days after the attack.
Though early reports described Boulahcen blowing herself up during the raid, Molins said she died from asphyxiation caused by the explosion of the suicide belt worn by the third unidentified man and being covered by rubble.
French authorities also detained the leader of a conservative Islamic community in Ariege, south-west France. Several former members of the community have been involved in violence and one, currently in Syria, is believed to have played a significant role in planning the attacks and may have recorded the claim of responsibility issued by Isis in their aftermath.
Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, told parliamentarians on Tuesday that 124 people had been handed preliminary charges since a state of emergency was imposed hours after the attacks, following more than 1,230 searches in which 230 weapons were recovered. He did not however specify what the charges were or if they were linked to the attacks.
France’s security officials held a meeting on Tuesday about protection for next year’s football tournament the European Championships, being hosted in cities around France. Concerns are especially high because one of the targets of the 13 November attacks was the country’s national stadium, the Stade de France.
Cazeneuve also held a meeting with French Muslim leaders, who have denounced the attacks and expressed concern about a backlash on France’s largely moderate, 5-million-strong Muslim community.
Italy on Tuesday laid to rest 28-year-old Valeria Solesin, the sole Italian victim of the Paris attacks, with a sombre state funeral in her home town, Venice.
Hundreds of mourners led by the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, gathered in St Mark’s Square on a cold but sunny day. Her parents, Alberto and Luciana, brother Dario and her fiance Andrea Ravagnani stood before the coffin.
Her father told the mourners: “We think of those all over France and Europe who mourn as we do a daughter, a son, a spouse, a friend.”
Speakers representing the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths spoke at the funeral.