Two suspects died and seven were arrested on Wednesday morning during a police raid in search of the alleged mastermind behind Friday's deadly attacks in Paris.
Heavily-armed police and soldiers swarmed the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis at 4:20 a.m. local time, targeting an apartment where the Belgian-born Islamic State operative Abdelhamid Abaaoud was believed to be hiding, The Wall Street Journal reported.
A female suspect in the apartment shot back at police with a Kalashnikov and then blew herself up with a suicide vest. Another suspect was killed in the raid, and several police officers were injured. By the time the operation ended at 11:45 a.m., police had detained three men who were hiding in the apartment and four people caught nearby.
"A particularly perilous, substantial operation has just ended," French President François Hollande said during a conference of France's mayors, according to The Wall Street Journal. "The police that undertook the operation knew the dangers. But they probably underestimated the violence they were met with."
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said that none of the suspects who were detained nor the two who were killed could be immediately identified. "It is impossible to tell you who was arrested," he said during a news conference after the raid, The Atlantic reported. "We are in the process of verifying that. Everything will be done to determine who is who."
Moulins said that phone taps and surveillance operations had suggested that Abaaoud could be hiding out in the apartment, the BBC reported. French news station BFMTV said the woman who detonated the suicide vest was a relative of Abaaoud.
In the wake of Friday night's horrific events, which killed 129 people and injured more than 350, 115,000 security forces have been mobilized in Paris, The Atlantic reported. France has also conducted airstrikes over the Islamic State stronghold of Raqaa in Syria.
In his address to the mayors on Wednesday, Hollande spoke of his plans to combat ISIS. "What we need to do is annihilate an army, which is a threat to the entire world. This is a mission I shall undertake," he said, according to Vice News. "We need a robust legal framework to confront the circumstances… I have decided that we should reestablish control of our frontiers."
The night before the raid, two Air France flights bound for Paris from the United States were diverted because of bomb threats, CNN reported. A flight heading out from Los Angeles was landed in Salt Lake City after a bomb threat was called in from the ground, and another plane from Washington's Dulles International Airport was diverted to Halifax, also because of a phoned-in bomb threat.
Both flights landed safely, and the U.S. government official who spoke to CNN did not know whether anyone was arrested, or if the same person had called in both threats.
