PARIS — A dragnet across Europe widened on Tuesday to include a second fugitive suspected to have taken part in the Paris terrorist attacks, as officials tried to make sense of a torrent of emerging intelligence about the planning and
PARIS — A dragnet across Europe widened on Tuesday to include a second fugitive suspected to have taken part in the Paris terrorist attacks, as officials tried to make sense of a torrent of emerging intelligence about the planning and execution of the attacks.
The police in France and Belgium continued their pursuit of one fugitive, Salah Abdeslam, 26, a Frenchman who is believed to have escaped to Brussels, while a French official — who was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to discuss operational details — said Tuesday evening that the authorities were looking for an accomplice, whose identity remained unclear.
Seven attackers died in the assault on Friday night, but it now appears that at least nine took part in or helped facilitate the attacks.
Some of the attackers, who killed 129 people in a closely coordinated series of assaults that lasted three hours, rented a house in a suburb northeast of Paris last week, telling the landlady that they were businessmen from Belgium, according to the French official.
The person suspected of organizing the attacks — a Belgian militant named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is 28 or 27 — is believed to be in Syria with fellow Islamic State militants, French and U.S. intelligence officials have concluded.
Early Tuesday, 10 French fighter jets, taking off from bases in Jordan and the Persian Gulf, dropped 16 bombs on what the French Defense Ministry described as an Islamic State command center and training center in the group’s self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa, Syria. Hours later, Russia carried out an attack on Raqqa, with cruise missiles and long-range bombers, after acknowledging that a terrorist bomb brought down a Russian jetliner over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt — a hotbed of Islamic State activity — on Oct. 31.
France, through its defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, took the extraordinary step Tuesday of invoking a European Union treaty that obliges members to help any member that is “the victim of armed aggression on its territory.”
