Seven suspects were arrested, one was killed, and one blew herself up during a seven-hour police operation Wednesday in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis which, per CNN, may have “thwarted” further terror attacks. French authorities say they believed that Abdelhamid Abaaoud—the Belgian man who is thought to have planned last Friday’s attacks in Paris—may have been in an apartment that was targeted in the raid, but it’s not yet clear whether that turned out to be true. From the New York Times:
The raid began around 4:15 a.m., when special police forces, backed by truckloads of soldiers, cordoned off an area near the Place Jean Jaurès, a main square in St.-Denis not far from the Stade de France, where three of the seven attackers who died on Friday night blew themselves up.
Inside the apartment, on the third floor of a building on the Rue du Corbillon, at least five suspects were holed up. One of them, the woman, opened fire and then killed herself; a man — “another terrorist,” [Parisian prosecutor François] Molins said — died from a combination of gunfire and the detonation of a grenade.
Quoting “police sources,” CNN reported that “the suspects targeted in Saint-Denis were ‘about to move on some kind of operation.’ “
The “commune” of Saint-Denis is home to a population of 118,000 including many Muslims.
