Abdelhamid Abaaoud: Paris attacks ringleader 'mingled with police while Bataclan massacre unfolded'

The leader of the Paris terror attacks returned to the scenes of the atrocities and mingled with police, rescue workers and journalists, it has emerged.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, 29, who died when police stormed his hideout, north of Paris, six days later, joined the crowd outside the Bataclan concert hall where 89 people were killed. He also revisited the restaurant and cafe terraces where he had helped to murder 40 people, the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, revealed.

Abaaoud’s ghoulish movements have been pieced together from telephone calls he made during the evening, Mr Molins said.

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French investigators have also confirmed that Abaaoud, along with an unidentified man who died when police stormed their hideout in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, had been planning another terror attack on the La Défense office district just west of the city.

Meanwhile, a suicide belt found in a suburban dustbin south of Paris offers fresh evidence that Europe’s most wanted man panicked or baulked at committing a further atrocity on the night of Friday 13 November.

The belt, packed with volatile explosives and metal bolts, was identical to those used by the seven other terrorists who blew themselves up that night.

French investigators believe that fugitive Salah Abdeslam, 26, dumped the belt in the dustbin in Montrouge, just south of the Paris city boundary, in the early hours of the Saturday following the attacks.

Abdeslam, believed to be still on the run in Belgium, made a mobile telephone call from Montrouge a few hours before he was “rescued” by two friends from Brussels at 5am on the Saturday.

The detonating device on the suicide belt had been disconnected, investigators say, suggesting that Abdeslam deliberately refused the kamikaze fate of seven of the other attackers, including his brother, Ibrahim.

“It is still possible that the explosive belt failed but that now appears less likely,” a source in the investigation said. “Abdeslam seems to have failed to go through with his mission, which suggest that he is on the run from Islamic State as much as from every police force in Europe.”

It also emerged that Abdeslam had been filmed by a security camera at a petrol station at Ressons, north of Paris, two days before the attacks with a Belgian man of Moroccan origin. A European and International arrest warrant has been issued by Belgian police for his companion – named as Mohamed Abrini, 30.

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Seven of the 10 attackers in Paris died on the night. Two others, including the presumed leader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, are believed to be among the three killed when an elite police team stormed the building in Saint-Denis.

The man who owned the building, Jawad Bendaoud, 29, was charged with terror-related offences. During six days in custody, Bendaoud denied that he knew that his temporary tenants were terrorists.

The prosecutor Mr Molins said last night that evidence from bugged phone calls suggested that Bendaoud knew he was harbouring people involved in the Paris attacks.

More than 60 gendarmes, armoured vehicles and two helicopters raided the tiny village of Artigat in Ariège in central France and arrested the so-called “White Emir”, Olivier Corel.

Corel, a 69-year-old Franco-Syrian, is alleged to have been a spiritual guru of radical Islamists in France for more than two decades. His alleged followers have included, among others, Mohamed Merah, the “scooter killer” who attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, and Fabien Clain, a French citizen now in Syria whose voice was identified on an Isis video claiming responsibility for the Paris atrocities.

Meanwhile, Brussels bristled with anxiety and anger over the continuing state of high alert, with politicians blaming each other for the intelligence and security failings that allowed the Paris bombers to plot the attacks from the city.

Children were due to return to school and metro services to resume this morning in Brussels, after four days of closure, but the threat level is still at its highest and police and soldiers will remain on the streets until 30 November. The city’s 160 schools have announced extra security measures, and while many tourist spots and museums are reopening, two conferences have been cancelled.