The mobile phone of a Bataclan attacker found in a rubbish bin led officers to a Paris flat, and foiled plans for an attack on Charles de Gaulle airport.
More than 100 French police and soldiers fired 5,000 bullets during a ferocious seven-hour raid in which the mastermind of the Paris attacks is believed to have been shot dead.
The dawn raid on the apartment block in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis was so violent that police must wait for the results of DNA tests to identify the remains of two terrorists who were killed.
But the Washington Post claims two intelligence sources have confirmed one of the dead is Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
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French security services had assumed the only way to neutralise Abaaoud was through airstrikes on Raqqa, because he was believed to be in Syria, where he had become one of ISIS' most high-profile recruiters.
But then the investigation into the murders of 129 people took an astonishing turn: witness accounts and information found on a discarded mobile telephone suggested Abaaoud was not in Syria, but had all along been holed up in an apartment in Saint-Denis, just a few minutes away from the Stade de France.
Worse still, it appeared he was controlling another terrorist cell preparing for a fresh wave of attacks on Paris.
A vital new lead came from a mobile phone thrown into a bin by one of the terrorists who attacked the Bataclan concert hall on Friday night. The last text message sent from it, at 9.42pm, just as the assault on the Bataclan was starting, said: "Off we go, here we go again."
Source: stuff.co
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