– First attacker identified –
The first of the seven dead attackers to be named was Omar Ismail Mostefai, a 29-year-old father and French citizen, identified from a severed finger among the carnage at the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 were killed in the worst of the bloodshed.
Police detained six people close to Mostefai, including his father, brother and sister-in-law, judicial sources said.
Born in the modest Paris suburb of Courcouronnes, he had eight convictions for petty crimes but had never served a prison sentence.
“It’s a crazy thing, it’s madness. Yesterday I was in Paris and I saw what a mess this was,” one of his brothers told AFP before he was taken into custody on Saturday night.
In Belgium, police swooped on five suspects in Brussels and prosecutors said that two of the attackers were Frenchmen who had lived in the Belgian capital.
Meanwhile, German authorities were questioning a man from Montenegro found last week with a car-load of eight Kalashnikov rifles, three pistols and explosives.
The man, who was heading for Paris, has refused to cooperate with police.
The discovery of a Syrian passport near the body of one attacker has raised fears that some of the assailants might have entered Europe as part of the huge influx of people fleeing Syria’s civil war.
Greek and Serbian authorities have confirmed the passport belonged to a man who registered as a refugee in October on the island of Leros and applied for asylum in Serbia a few days later.
But European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who has urged EU countries to take in refugees, said there was no need for a complete review of the bloc’s policies.
“Those who organised, who perpetrated the attacks are the very same people who the refugees are fleeing and not the opposite,” he said.
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