Paris attacks: French police launch raids as military strikes Isis in Syria

France’s response to the Paris terror attacks gained pace on Monday with counter-terrorism raids arrests across the country and “massive” airstrikes launched on Islamic State targets in Syria.

Tactical police units led raids in four locations in southern and northern Franceearly on Monday, reportedly arresting at least nine people and seizing weapons from homes.

The raids, conducted as part of the country’s state of emergency, coincided with airstrikes on Isis targets late on Sunday in which French aircraft dropped 20 bombs across the group’s northern Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.

The French response came amid reports that a key suspect in the Paris attack was let go in the first frantic hours after the attacks on Friday night which killed 129 people and injured more than 350. 

Twenty-six-year-old Salah Abdeslam, one of three brothers allegedly involved in the attacks, was travelling in a Volkswagen Golf with two other men when they were pulled over for a routine check near the French-Belgian border early on Saturday morning.

After offering identification, the men were allowed to continue their journey, because their names were not yet on any wanted list.

It later emerged that Salah Abdeslam was the man who rented a Belgian-registered VW Polo that was parked outside the Bataclan concert hall where 89 people died.

One of his brothers, 31-year-old Ibrahim Abdeslam, blew himself up in the attack on the rue de Voltaire near the concert hall.

Another Abdeslam brother, as yet unnamed by authorities, has been arrested inBelgium.

Salah Abdeslam remains on the run. An international warrant has been issued for his arrest. Police have described him as dangerous.

In the early hours of Monday, tactical units of the French national police force – Raid (Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion) and GIPN (Groupes d’Intervention de la Police Nationale) – raided properties in Toulouse, Grenoble, the north-east Parisian suburb of Bobigny, and the town of Jeumont near the Belgian border.

At least half a dozen arrests were made during raids on homes in Grenoble shortly after 1am. Cash and weapons were also seized, according to Le Dauphine.

In Toulouse, French media reported a “preventative operation” in and around the area that was home to Mohamed Merah, known as the “ride-by killer” who gunned down several soldiers then attacked children at a Jewish school murdering a a total of seven people over several days before dying in a police shoot-out in 2012.

At least three people have been taken into police custody although reports say these were “administrative searches” on properties as part of a general anti=terrorist operation and not part of the Paris attack investigation.

In Jeumont, streets were closed around a building that was being searched. Homes were raided in Bobigny.

Late on Sunday, France launched the country’s biggest air-raid on Syria to date, targeting the Islamic State’s de facto capital Raqqa, just two days after the group claim responsibility for the co-ordinated attacks on Paris.

A defence official was quoted by Associated Press as saying the strikes were “massive” and had destroyed two jihadi sites in Raqqa.

“The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped,” a defence ministry statement said

“The first target destroyed was used by Da’esh [an alternative name for Islamic State] as a command post, a recruitment centre for jihadists, and a depot for arms and ammunition.

“The second target was a terrorist training camp.”

The strikes, conducted in collaboration with the US, targeted sites previously identified on reconnaissance missions. Reports from activists inside Raqqa suggest the airstrike targets were known Isis strongholds, including Division 17, an army base to the north of the city that had been under Isis control since July 2014.

The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said the airstrikes were a direct retaliation for the Paris attacks, which he said were masterminded by Isis leaders inside Syria.

“A group situated in Syria ... is organising attacks [with] actors situated in Belgium who are not known to our services, and is inciting them to act on French territory, just like they incite them to act in other European cities,” Cazeneuve said in an interview on France 2 TV.

“As a result, we are facing a new reality, one of acts of war organised by Barbarians from inside Syria.”

Information from inside Syria suggested the bombings had cut water and electricity supplies across Raqqa.

Activists in the city have said the bombings have caused “panic”, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had “no information about casualties so far”.

Isis’s media arm, Amaaq, claimed the sites hit by French bombs had already been abandoned and that nobody was killed in the strikes.

It also emerged on Sunday that Iraqi intelligence warned of imminent assaults by Islamic State on countries fighting against them in Iraq and Syria. The warning of “bombings or assassinations or hostage taking in the coming days” came a day before the Paris attacks at the Stade de France, the packed Bataclan concert hall and a string of cafes and restaurants in the French capital’s north-eastern 10th and 11th arrondissements.

A senior French security official told the Associated Press that French intelligence received such warnings “all the time” and “every day”. But Iraqi intelligence officials said they had warned France about specific details.

These included the allegation that the attackers were trained for this operation and had been sent from Raqqa back to France, where they met a sleeper cell that helped them carry out their plan. In all, 24 people were involved: 19 attackers and five others in charge of logistics and planning. None of these details have so far been corroborated by French or western intelligence agencies, AP said.

The New York Times, citing French and US officials, reported that the attackers communicated “at some point beforehand” with Isis members in Syria.

Two more of the seven suicide bombers who died in the assaults had also been identified, police said, without confirming their names.

The Paris public prosecutor, François Molins, said in a separate statement that at least three French suicide bombers were involved in the attacks, two of them living in the Belgian capital. The Washington Post named another suicide bomber as Bilal Hadfi, whose nationality was not known but who was thought to have fought in Syria.

In a sign of the jumpy atmosphere in Paris since the attacks, the deadliest in France since the second world war, people who had gathered at the Place de République scattered in panic on Sunday evening, prompting armed police to rush into the square. It proved a false alarm, possibly caused by a firework.

The first of the killers to be formally identified was earlier named as Omar Ismaïl Mostefai, 29, from Courcouronnes, south of Paris. Seven of Mostefai’s relatives, including his father and brother, were being questioned by French police, a judicial source confirmed.

As it became clear that the carnage – claimed by Isis as revenge for France joining US-led airstrikes against its forces in Syria and Iraq – involved a multinational team with links to the Middle East, Belgium and possibly Germany, the investigation widened to several European countries.

Most of the Belgian arrests were made in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, a hotbed of radicalism in the country that proportionately has supplied more fighters for Isis than any other inEurope. The district has harboured several other Islamist attackers, including Ayoub el-Khazzani, 25, whose attack on a high-speed Thalys train in August was thwarted by off-duty US soldiers, and Mehdi Nemmouche, who killed three people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014.

The Serbian interior ministry said a Syrian passport found near the body of one of the suicide bombers was used by a refugee entering the country on 7 October, four days after being registered on the Greek island of Leros. It was not known whether the passport was real or fake.

The ministry said the 25-year-old man, whom they identified as AA but was named by the Serbian newspaper Blic as Ahmed Almuhamed, had requested asylum. A Greek newspaper, Protothema, said he was travelling with a second man, Mohammed Almuhamed, and reproduced what it said were their travel documents.

The eastern Aegean island of Leros has been a transit point this summer for thousands of refugees and migrants entering Europe. Greece confirmed the Syrian passport had been registered in Leros, but officials warned there was no evidence linking it to the attacker, pointing out that the person holding it may not have been its legitimate owner or it could be a fake.

Amid calls from several countries for the EU’s borders to be radically tightened in the face of the huge influx of refugees and migrants, the bloc’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, stressed at a G20 summit in Turkey that the “man responsible for the attacks in Paris … is a criminal, and not a refugee and not an asylum seeker.”

The EU said it would hold a meeting of its interior and justice ministers next Friday to assess the impact of the Paris attacks. Cazeneuve asked for the meeting, saying “our battle against terrorism must be, more than ever, steadfast”, and must be reinforced at the European level.

In Germany, authorities were looking into a possible link to a 51-year-old Montenegrin man recently stopped with a car full of arms and explosives. The Bavarian interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said officers found automatic weapons, dynamite, hand grenades and ammunition in the man’s car, along with a mobile phone and car GPS system indicating he was en route to Paris.

Announcing three days of national mourning and a national state of emergency, the French president, François Hollande, called the coordinated assault – “prepared, organised and planned overseas, with help from inside” – an “act of war” that must be countered “mercilessly”.