Liveblog: Paris attacks
Good morning from Middle East Eye in London. Here are the latest developments:
- Prosecutors have named the alleged 'mastermind' of the Paris attacks as Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was described by the AP news agency as one of the Islamic State's principal executioners in Raqqa.
- Salah Abdeslam was named in an arrest warrant as a driver for the Bataclan killers. He is reported to be a French national living in Belgium. He remains at large.
- Belgian police launched raids in the Molenbeek area connected to the Paris attack.
- Two of the attackers in Paris were named by prosecutors this morning - Samy Amimour and Ahmad al-Mohammad. Amimour was one of the Bataclan attackers, while Mohammad blew himself up outside the Stade de France.
- French police raided more than 168 addresses overnight.
- French jets struck multiple targets in Raqqa overnight, after the French government described the Paris attacks as an 'act of war'.
Live Updates
Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, told Middle East Eye that the raids by the French and Belgian police were likely to be broad in scope and put any IS suspects on the backfoot.
"Clearly they’re dealing with a network that already knew about, so they’re just stamping down heavily on them, trying to pick up all the pieces," he said.
"I think that you’re more likely to now see people scarpering, probably back to Syria and Iraq, than you are trying to launch attacks."
"Unless there’s some pretty major slip-ups they’re going to try and sweep up as much of the network as they can now and then figure out exactly who they’ve caught."
British security services have foiled around seven terror attacks since June with fighters returning from Syria posing a growing threat, Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday.
"Our security and intelligence services have stopped something like seven attacks in the last six months, albeit attacks planned on a smaller scale" than Friday's attacks in Paris, he told BBC Radio 4 from Turkey.
Cameron said he still needed to convince more British lawmaker to carry out military strikes against Islamic State (IS) targets in Syria.
The British government, which is already involved in bombing IS targets in Iraq, had lost a parliamentary vote in 2013 to extend military action to Syria.
However, Cameron added that he would take immediate action if UK interests were at stake, citing drone attacks which had killed British militants in August.
Britain is also to recruit an extra 1,900 security and intelligence staff to counter the threat of terrorist violence following the Paris attacks, British media reported on Monday.
It would be the biggest increase in British security spending since the 7 July, 2005 bombings in London that killed dozens of people.
