The Guardian — The investigation to identify members of the terrorist cell behind France’s deadliest attack since the second world war has spread to Belgium, Greece and Germany as a 29-year-old Frenchman was named as one of the killers.
Multiple sources told French media that a severed finger found at the Bataclan theatre, where three gunmen killed 89 people during a concert on Friday night, belonged to Omar Ismaïl Mostefai, a petty criminal of Algerian origin.
Paris prosecutor François Molins said the suspect was born in the poor southern Paris suburb of Courcouronnes, and had been flagged as a radicalisation risk in 2010 but “never been implicated in an investigation or a terrorist association”.
A property in Courcouronnes linked to Mostefai was searched on Saturday, and his father, brother and brother’s sister were detained by police. It emerged on Sunday that the getaway vehicle used in the attacks on a number of restaurants and bars in Paris had been found in Montreuil, an eastern suburb of the French capital.
Molins also said that a Syrian passport, belonging to a man born in 1990 who was not known to the French authorities, had been found lying close by the bodies of two other jihadis, who both blew themselves up in the course of their attacks.
In Greece, citizen protection minister, Nikos Toskas, said earlier that the passport’s holder had entered the European Union through the Greek island of Leros on 3 October, adding: “We do not know if the passport was checked by other countries through which the holder likely passed.”
Reports that a second Syrian suspect had entered Europe via Greece were denied by a Greek official. “These reports are untrue and need clarification,” the official said.
The burgeoning investigation spread to Belgium on Saturday where homes were raided and three people were arrested in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, hours after another trio were arrested at the French-Belgian border in a car allegedly used in the attacks.
Molins said one of the vehicles driven by the Paris terrorists was registered in Belgium and hired by a French national living there.
He said at least 129 people were killed and 352 more injured – including 90 critically – in the attacks by three separate teams on the Stade de France, a city-centre concert hall and a series of packed cafes and bars.
Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the atrocities, which the French president, François Hollande, denounced as an “act of war” that must be countered “mercilessly”.
In southern Germany, the Bavarian state premier, Horst Seehofer, said there was “reason to believe” that a man arrested last week during a routine motorway check with “many machine guns, revolvers and explosives” in his car might “possibly be linked” to the attacks.
Isis said it had dispatched eight jihadi – leaving open the possibility that one may still be on the run – wearing suicide bomb belts and carrying machine guns, across the French capital on Friday night in a “blessed attack on … crusader France”.
The Wall Street Journal reported that at least one of the attackers at the Stade de France had a ticket to the France-Germany friendly match on Friday night and tried to enter the venue, citing a security guard who was on duty, as well as French police. The guard said the attacker was discovered wearing an explosives vest when he was searched at the entrance to the stadium about 15 minutes after the game started.
Shortly afterwards, three gunmen entered a popular concert hall in the capital’s north-eastern 11th arrondissement, while others opened fire on a string of cafes and restaurants not far away, crowded on a mild November evening.
The attacks came despite France – one of the founding members of the US-led coalition carrying out airstrikes against Isis positions in Iraq and Syria – being on a high state of alert for possible terrorist attacks in the run-up to a global climate conference later this month.
Under the first national state of emergency to be declared in France since 1961, an extra 1,500 soldiers were mobilised to reinforce police in Paris, Hollande’s office said. All Saturday’s sports events in the capital were cancelled, while many major shops, department stores, museums and tourist sites – including the Louvre, Eiffel Tower and Disneyland – stayed closed. Several metro stations were also shut.
Isis also released an undated video on Saturday calling on Muslims to continue attacking France. Its foreign media arm, al-Hayat Media Centre, filmed a number of militants – apparently French citizens – sitting cross-legged in an unidentified location and burning their passports.
The deadliest assault was at the Bataclan, a popular concert hall a few hundred metres from the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine hit along with a Jewish supermarket by Islamist militants in January during a three-day onslaught that left 20 people dead, including three Islamist gunmen.
