A woman blew herself up as elite French police raided an apartment early Wednesday near Paris targeting high-level terror suspects involved in last week’s attacks, officials said.
Four men and another woman were also arrested during the operation in the northern suburb of St-Denis. Heavy gunfire was reported for several hours.
A woman detonated her suicide vest as the apartment was stormed, according to the Paris Prosecutor’s Office.
Officials confirmed that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian jihadist who is suspected of being a lynchpin in the assaults that killed 129 people in Paris on Friday, was one of several people targeted by the raid. However, it was not immediately clear whether Abaaoud was among those arrested.
GALLERY: Gunfire Erupts in Paris Suburb
Several explosions could be heard around 7:30 a.m. local time (1:30 a.m. ET), about three hours into the operation. Officials said it was ongoing as of 8:25 a.m. local time (2:25 a.m. ET).
Veronique Haounoh, 43, was holed-up in an apartment across the street from the operation with several neighbors and heard “explosions at irregular intervals.”
“We heard so many booms,” she told NBC News. “I’m shaking. We are very scared, I can’t stop crying.”
Witness Abdel Nour al Jazaeri, an unemployed Algerian immigrant, told NBC News that he saw police raiding a building and heard intense gunfire beginning at 4:30 a.m.
A local resident who lives nearby said that he heard “lots of shots” between 4:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. local time.
“I was sleeping,” said the man, who identified himself only as Alexandre. “I heard the noise — the shots. I said, ‘That’s not fireworks’.”
Saint Denis is a low-income area that’s close to the Stade de France, a 81,000-seat venue which was targeted by three suicide bombers during a game involving the national team and Germany on Friday.
What sounded like a single gunshot rang out as police continue raid, cordon outside paris pic.twitter.com/gn9Re8zz2Y
— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) November 18, 2015
A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office said the police operation — which the involved France’s elite RAID units — was planned.
Authorities have been searching for two more suspects believed to have directly participated in the series of bombings and shootings in Paris Friday that killed at least 129 people. Seven attackers were killed, most in suicide bombings, officials said.
Police had already been looking for known accomplice Salah Abdeslam, 26. French officials told The Associated Press that an analysis of the attacks indicated one additional person directly involved in the onslaught remains unaccounted for.
On Tuesday, two Air France passenger jets leaving from the U.S. for Paris were diverted after bomb threats were phoned in, the airline said.
Both planes landed safely — a flight from the Washington, D.C., area in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a plane from Los Angeles in Salt Lake City, Utah, officials said.
(via NBC News)
