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Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the evil mastermind behind the deadly Nov. 13 Paris terrorist attacks, is reportedly dead.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian militant, who had boasted of mounting attacks in Europe for the Islamic State, was accused of orchestrating Friday’s coordinated bombings and shootings.
Police originally thought he was in Syria, but their investigations led them to a house in the Paris suburb of St Denis and heavily armed officers stormed the building before dawn, triggering a massive firefight and multiple explosions.
Two terrorist suspects died in the operation including a woman suicide bomber who detonated her device during the gunfight.
“Abdel Hamid Abaaoud has just been formally identified, after comparing fingerprints, as having been killed during the (police) raid,” the statement from the prosecutor said. “It was the body we had discovered in the building, riddled with bullets.”
Details about Abdelhamid Abaaoud began to emerge after he was named the prime suspect behind the atrocities in the French capital last Friday in which 129 people were killed and hundreds were wounded.
Once described a “happy-go-lucky student” at one of Brussels’ most prestigious high schools, Abdelhamid Abaaoud radicalised to become Belgium’s most notorious jihadi.
The child of Moroccan immigrants, he even recruited his 13-year-old brother to join him in Syria to fight alongside Islamic State.
Officials said they believe he was involved in an attack on a Paris-bound high-speed train that was foiled by three young Americans in August, and the other against a church in the French capital’s suburbs.
In a video made public last year, Abdelhamid Abaaoud said: “All my life, I have seen the blood of Muslims flow.
“I pray that Allah will break the backs of those who oppose him, his soldiers and his admirers, and that he will exterminate them.”
Belgian authorities suspected him of helping to organise and finance a terror cell in the eastern city of Verviers that was broken up in an armed police raid in January in which his two accomplices were killed.
The following month, he was quoted by Islamic State’s English-language magazine Dabiq as saying that he had secretly returned to Belgium to lead the terror cell and then escaped to Syria in the aftermath of the raid, despite having his picture broadcast across the news.
He boasted: “I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance!”
Agencies/Canadajournal
