Update: 11:36am ET
Two suspects were killed and seven people were arrested following a dawn raid in Paris, in an apartment in the multicultural district of Saint-Denis, as the city still reels from last week’s terrorist attacks on the city that killed at least 129 people and wounded hundreds.
Here’s what we know about the police operation this morning so far:
- The raid began shortly after 4am local time and was declared over by the police at close to noon (link in French).
https://twitter.com/standardnews/status/666927601823256577
- The apartment raided was in a building at 8 Rue du Corbillon in Saint-Denis, about a mile from the Stade de France, where three suicide bombers blew themselves up on Friday. Videos of lines of police vehicles, and of gunshots ringing out across the neighbourhood, were soon posted online. Five officers suffered minor injuries, according to French police.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jnOYRj6ueA - During the siege a woman detonated an explosive vest and killed herself, according to French prosecutors, while the police said that a man had also been killed by a police sniper. Three men at the property, and as many as four more people nearby, were arrested.
- It’s not yet clear whether Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the man thought to be the mastermind behind the Paris attacks, was in the apartment. The woman who blew her herself up in the flat was a relative of Abaaoud’s, the BBC reported, citing France’s BFM TV. Police are now testing DNA from the suspects who were killed to determine if Abaaoud was among them, CNN reports.
- Some reports this morning have suggested that Salah Abdeslam, the brother of one of the attackers killed at the scene last week, was one of the men in the Saint-Denis flat.
- Also killed in the Saint-Denis raid: A police dog named Diesel. After the news about Diesel broke, the hashtag #JeSuisChien started trending on Twitter—a take-off of #JeSuisCharlie following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January.
- While the raid was going on, security threats grounded two Air France flights. The planes, en route from the US to Paris, were diverted after anonymous bomb threats were made; passengers were evacuated in the US and Canada. The FBI found no evidence of explosives on the planes.