Hasna Ait Boulahcen, who died in a police raid after the Paris attacks, died of asphyxiation, French prosecutors say.
However, her family argues she was murdered.
Hasna Ait Boulahcen, 26, died in a Saint-Denis flat alongside suspected ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
Her family’s lawyer Fabien N’Doumou said she may have been shot by police.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has said an autopsy shows Hasna Ait Boulahcen died from asphyxiation after an explosion caused by a suicide vest.
Reports in the days after the raid said Hasna Ait Boulahcen had detonated the suicide vest.
In early January, prosecutors said a third suspect who died in the raid, Belgian-Moroccan national Chakib Akrouh, was wearing the explosives.
Hasna Ait Boulahcen’s mother, sister and brother have lodged a murder complaint, against persons unknown. They are asking for her body to be returned for burial, and for the investigation to re-examine how she died.
The raid took place on November 18, five days after the attacks in which 130 people were killed.
Reports in French media said Hasna Ait Boulahcen, who was Abdelhamid Abaaoud’s cousin, was responsible for finding the flat in which he hid, and drove him there in the days after the attacks.
Hasna Ait Boulahcen, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, “was under pressure by her cousin”, the family’s complaint says, according to French network iTele.
The complaint, according to iTele, focuses on a recording made outside the flat during the raid, in which a woman’s voice is heard shouting: “Can I leave? I want to leave.”
Footage of the fugitive Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam are said to have emerged, according to French news channel BFM TV.
The images were captured on the morning of November 14 by CCTV cameras at a French petrol station, a day after the attacks in which 130 were killed.
In them, Salah Abdeslam seems relaxed, walking with his hands in his pockets.
Salah Abdeslam is thought to have been in charge of logistics for the groups of gunmen who carried out the attacks.
He is said to have called his two friends, Mohammed Amri and Salah Hamza Attou, from Paris early on November 14 to come and pick him up and take him to Belgium.
En route from Paris to Brussels, the three men stopped at a petrol station near the Belgian border for about 15 minutes, where a CCTV camera filmed them, BFM reports.
Photo Reuters
At that point, the three men had already been through three police checks, but had not been stopped as Salah Abdeslam had not yet been connected to the Paris attacks.
Mohammed Amri and Salah Hamza Attou later dropped off Salah Abdeslam in the district of Laeken in Brussels.
The two were arrested in Molenbeek the next day and face terror charges, while Salah Abdeslam is still on the run.
The Paris attacks are believed to have been at least partly planned in Brussels. Belgian police have arrested 10 people as part of their investigation.
The suspected ringleader was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national. He and his cousin Hasna Aitboulahcen died in a fierce gun battle five days after the attacks, when police raided a flat in Paris where they were hiding, heavily armed.
Ten ISIS commanders have been killed in US-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in the past month, a US military spokesman has said.
Some were linked to last month’s attacks in Paris and planning further attacks on the West, Col. Steve Warren added.
He named one as Charaffe al-Mouadan, who he said had a direct link to Paris attack cell leader Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
Another was a UK-educated Bangladeshi computer systems engineer, Col. Steve Warren said.
The US-led coalition has been targeting ISIS in Iraq and Syria for over a year. Russia recently began its own air attacks against armed opponents of the Syrian government, including ISIS.
Syria-based Charaffe al-Mouadan was killed in an airstrike on December 24, said Col. Steve Warren.
Another man with connections to the Paris attackers, Abdul Qader Hakim, died two days later in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, he added.
Col. Steve Warren added that an earlier airstrike, on December 10, killed the UK-educated Bangladeshi computer engineer – who, he said, had supported ISIS hacking activities, anti-surveillance technology and weapons development.
“Over the past month we’ve killed 10 ISIL [ISIS] leadership figures with targeted air strikes, including several external attack planners, some of whom are linked to the Paris attacks,” he said.
“Others had designs on further attacking the West.
“As long as ISIL external attack planners are operating, the US military will hunt them and kill them.”
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national, was killed in a police raid in a Paris suburb just days after the November 13 attacks in the French capital which killed 130 people at multiple venues in the city. Most of the attackers also died.
A man has been arrested in the Paris region as part of the investigation into the November 13 attacks in the city, sources close to French police say.
Some 2,700 raids have been conducted since the attacks, with 360 people placed under house arrest across France, the AFP reports.
Police have also arrested two people in northern France suspected of supplying weapons to one of the gunmen in earlier attacks on Paris, reports say.
They were taken in for questioning.
The 29-year-old man arrested on December 15 was planning to travel to Syria, according to one French media report.
The Paris prosecutor’s office says the two people arrested in northern France were held on suspicion of helping to provide guns to Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked a kosher supermarket in January.
The prosecutor’s office confirmed that the man arrested was Claude Hermant, who is known to have links to far-right groups, while the other is his partner.
Amedy Coulibaly killed four people inside the supermarket, and separately a policewoman, before dying in a shootout with police.
Meanwhile, a prominent Islamist preacher, Sven Lau, has been arrested in Moenchengladbach, western Germany, on suspicion of supporting a group linked to ISIS militants, and recruiting fighters for it.
Sven Lau – a convert to Islam – is known for a series of controversial initiatives, like setting up so-called Sharia police patrols to enforce Islamic rules in the western city of Wuppertal.
The state interior minister for North Rhine-Westphalia, Ralf Jaeger, said the state authorities were trying to monitor hundreds of Islamists they believed were willing to use violence.
He said Sven Lau played an important role in trying to radicalize people: “He is one of the leading figures of the Salafist scene. He is someone who is trying to infect other young people with this extremism. He openly campaigns for terrorist organizations. That’s clearly dangerous because more and more people slip into this scene.”
It is known that the two Stade de France bombers arrived on Leros aboard smugglers’ boats on October 3, then left for Athens with four other men, who have not been seen since.
A travel agent in Leros, who unwittingly sold the two bombers ferry tickets to Athens, says he is reasonably sure he also served Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who stood out from hundreds of other migrants because he spoke French.
A trustee at the main island hospital also claims Abdelhamid Abaaoud came to the hospital to be treated for a minor leg wound. He claims Abdelhamid Abaaoud appeared nervous and suspicious, and offered a €100 ($110) bribe to jump the treatment queue.
Belgian and French officials say Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Islamist of Moroccan descent, organized November’s attacks which killed 130 people.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud was known to have been living in Athens in January this year, but fled to Syria after a failed attempt by Belgian police to catch him.
French and Belgian police are seeking two new suspects accused of aiding the fugitive suspect from the Paris attacks Salah Abdeslam, the federal prosecutor’s office says.
The two suspects are “armed and dangerous” and are thought to have helped Salah Abdeslam travel to Hungary in September.
Investigators say Salah Abdeslam may have driven the suicide bombers at the Stade de France to their target on the night of the Paris attacks.
The November 13 attacks left 130 people dead and more than 350 wounded.
Salah Abdeslam was stopped at the Hungary-Austria border in September accompanied by two men with fake IDs bearing the names Soufiane Kayal and Samir Bouzid, Belgian police said.
“The Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the investigating judge wish to appeal to the public again to look out for two new suspects the investigators are actively searching for,” the Belgian prosecutor’s statement said.
Salah Abdeslam’s precise role in the attacks remains unclear. There are suggestions he was meant to carry out a suicide attack on the night but decided against it.
The name Soufiane Kayal was used to rent a house searched in November after the Paris attacks.
The identity card of Samir Bouzid was used to transfer money to Hasna Aitboulahcen, the cousin of attacks ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud, four days after the attacks, police said.
Both Hasna Aitboulahcen and Abdelhamid Abaaoud were killed in a police raid on the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, along with a third, as-yet unidentified person.
On December 4, the Paris cafe La Bonne Biere became the first of the venues targeted during the co-ordinated assaults to reopen its doors.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks, was near the Bataclan concert hall during a siege there, French prosecutors say.
Prosecutor Francois Molins said mobile phone data also showed Abdelhamid Abaaoud returned to cafes and restaurants targeted in the attacks.
France’s general prosecutor added there was evidence that Abdelhamid Abaaoud was planning an attack on Paris’s La Defense business district.
Meanwhile an arrest warrant was issued in Belgium for a man named Mohamed Abrini over the attacks.
Francois Molins gave more details of the raid in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis in which Abdelhamid Abaaoud was killed.
As well as Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his cousin Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a third unidentified man died in that raid. Francois Molins said it is believed he was the third attacker in the team that attacked bars and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements.
Jawad Bendaoud, the man who lent the Saint-Denis flat, has been put under formal investigation for “criminal conspiracy in connection with a terrorist enterprise”.
Also on November 24, Belgian prosecutors said that two days before the attacks, new suspect Mohamed Abrini was seen driving a car with suspect Salah Abdeslam at a petrol station on the highway to Paris.
Mohamed Abrini is described as “dangerous and probably armed”.
Salah Abdeslam is currently the subject of an international manhunt after the attacks which killed 130 people.
The Renault Clio that Mohamed Abrini was seen driving was later used in the attacks, prosecutors say.
Police say he should not be approached by the public.
Belgian prosecutors also said on November 24 that they have also partially identified two other men who have been taken into custody.
They are under suspicion – in the words of a statement – of “participating in the activities of a terrorist group”, and “acts of terrorist murder”.
The men, named as Ali O and Lazez A, are both from the Brussels district of Molenbeek, and both will appear separately in court during the course of this week.
French prosecutors have said that a third body has been recovered from the apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis raided by police after last week’s attacks.
They confirmed the body was that of Hasna Aitboulahcen, and was found overnight in a search of the flat following November 18 raid.
Hasna Aitboulahcen, 26, is widely reported to have been the cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and blew herself up.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of Paris attacks, was also killed in the raid.
The near-simultaneous attacks by suicide bombers and gunmen on bars and restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall and Stade de France stadium on November 13 killed 129 people and left hundreds of people wounded.
Photo Twitter
ISIS said it was behind the attacks.
Demonstrations have been banned under France’s state of emergency, but dozens of French artists and cultural figures have urged people to make a lot of “noise and light”, by turning on music and lights, at 21:20 local time on November 20 to mark the exact time a week ago that the attacks began.
Prosecutors have now confirmed the identities of two of the three suspects who died in the seven-hour-long raid in the Rue Cormillon apartment on November 18.
The prosecutor’s office said Hasna Aitboulahcen’s passport was found near her body.
News that Abdelhamid Abaaoud – a well-known face of ISIS and on international “most wanted” lists – and at least one of his accomplices may have travelled undetected from Syria before carrying out the attacks has raised fears about the security of the European Union’s borders.
EU interior ministers are meeting in Brussels to discuss tougher measures, including tightening the external borders of the passport-free Schengen area.
France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, on his way into the meeting, said the EU had “wasted too much time on a number of urgent issues” and hoped “today takes the decisions that we must take”.
A draft resolution for today’s EU meeting says ministers will agree to implement “necessary systematic and co-ordinated checks at external borders, including on individuals enjoying the right of free movement”.
This means EU citizens, along with non-EU citizens, will have their passports routinely checked against a database of known or suspected terrorists and those involved in organized crime.
Ministers will also consider cracking down on the movement of firearms within the EU, the collection of passenger data for those taking internal flights and also blocking funding for terrorists.
ISIS militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of last week’s attacks in Paris, was among those killed in a French police raid on November 18, prosecutors say.
French prosecutors confirmed Belgian citizen Abdelhamid Abaaoud had died in a flat in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud’s body was found riddled with bullets and shrapnel in the apartment.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he had received intelligence that Abdelhamid Abaaoud passed through Greece on his return from Syria.
It is unclear whether Abdelhamid Abaaoud had concealed himself among the thousands of refugees arriving in Greece before heading for other EU nations.
One of the other dead Paris attackers, who blew himself up at the Stade de France stadium, was traced to Greece by his fingerprints, where he was registered as a refugee.
In another development, nine arrests were made in Belgium after searches in connection with Paris attacks, and police carried out new searches in France.
Confirming Abdelhamid Abaaoud left for Syria last year, Bernard Cazeneuve said no EU states had signaled his return.
The minister also implicated Abdelhamid Abaaoud in four out of six attacks foiled in France since this spring.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, 28, was linked to a plot in April to attack a church near Paris and police are also investigating a possible connection to the attack on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris in August.
In Belgium, Abdelhamid Abaaoud had links to an Islamist cell broken up by security forces in the town of Verviers in January, with the deaths of two gunmen.
He was identified from his fingerprints.
Paris attacks left 129 people dead and hundreds injured.
Eight people were arrested and at least two killed in the raid on the property in Saint Denis. Heavily armed police stormed the building after a tip-off that Abdelhamid Abaaoud was in Paris.
A woman at the flat – reported in French media to be Abdelhamid Abaaoud’s cousin – died during the raid after activating a suicide vest.
The prosecutor’s office said it was still unclear whether Abdelhamid Abaaoud had blown himself up or not.
Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters that a non-EU state had alerted France on November 9 that Abdelhamid Abaaoud had been in Greece.
Two people have died during a police raid on a flat in Paris suburb Saint-Denis, while seven arrests were made.
A woman has blown herself up and a suspect was shot dead.
Police targeted the flat in Saint-Denis in a search for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged mastermind of last week’s attacks in Paris, when 129 people were killed.
The fate of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, previously thought to be in Syria, is still unclear.
A government spokesman said remains of a third body may be under the rubble.
Prosecutor Francois Molins announced earlier that intelligence indicated Abdelhamid Abaaoud was in Paris.
All victims of the attacks – which targeted a concert hall, cafes and the Stade de France stadium and were claimed by ISIS – have now been identified, the government said.
The operation in Saint-Denis – where the Stade de France is located – began at 04:20 local time.
Speaking from the scene afterwards, Francois Molins said it had been ordered after phone taps and surveillance operations suggested Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, could be there.
The prosecutor said a young woman – said by France’s BFMTV to be a relative of Abdelhamid Abaaoud – had detonated her explosives belt soon after the raid began.
Another suspect was killed by grenades and police bullets, Francois Molins said.
The spokesman for the French interior ministry, Pierre-Henry Brandet, later told French TV station BFMTV that work was being done to establish whether the remains of a “third terrorist” were buried in the rubble.
Five members of the RAID police anti-terrorism unit were lightly injured while a RAID “assault dog”, a seven-year-old Belgian Shepherd called Diesel, was killed.
Three men were arrested in the apartment. Two others were found hiding in rubble and a further two – including the man who provided the lodging – were also detained, he said.
He did not give the identities of those detained.
As the operation got under way, roads were blocked off around Rue de la Republique in Saint-Denis, by truck-loads of soldiers and armed police.
Local residents, who were urged to stay indoors, spoke of hearing continuous gunshots and large explosions.
Amine Guizani told the Associated Press: “They were shooting for an hour, non-stop. There were grenades. It was going, stopping, Kalashnikovs, starting again.”
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised the security forces for operating “under fire for a number of hours in conditions that we have never seen before today”.
At least one person died as French police have raided a flat in the north Paris suburb of Saint-Denis in an operation linked to last week’s attacks.
A female suspect blew herself up with a suicide belt, a prosecutor says. Some reports suggest two suspects died. There were explosions and gunfire in the operation, which is continuing.
Five people have also been arrested.
The focus of the operation is Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged mastermind of the ISIS-claimed attacks that killed 129 people in Paris on November 13.
Roads have been blocked off around Rue de la Republique in Saint-Denis, in the same district as the Stade de France where suicide attackers detonated bombs.
Truckloads of soldiers joined armed police at the scene.
Photo AP
At least five people were believed to have been in the targeted third floor flat in Rue de La Republique, French media report.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the raid started at 04:20 local time and was still ongoing.
A woman inside the apartment set off an explosives vest at the beginning of the raid and died.
Three men who were also in the apartment have been detained by anti-terrorist police.
A man and a woman were stopped and detained close to the apartment, police said.
There are unconfirmed reports that one person remains holed up in the flat. Other unconfirmed reports have put the death toll at between two and three.
Several police officers are reported to have been wounded in the operation.
Earlier, Deputy Mayor Stephane Peu urged local residents to stay indoors, saying “it is not a new attack but a police intervention”.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 27-year-old Belgian of Moroccan origin, had been thought to have organized last week’s attacks from Syria, but is now believed to have been one of those in the St Denis apartment.
Security sources have said surveillance video showed a possible ninth assailant during the attacks.
The video reportedly shows a third figure in the car carrying the group which attacked several bars and restaurants.
It is not clear if this ninth attacker is one of two suspected accomplices detained in Belgium or is someone still on the run.
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