France had been on high alert since Islamist gunmen attacked the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January, killing 18 people.
French President Francois Hollande (L) escorts Nicolas Sarkozy, former president and current head of the Les Republicains political party, before a meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, November 15, 2015.
Police questioned on Sunday the
relatives of one of the suicide attackers who brought carnage to Paris
on Friday, with France denouncing the strikes as an act of war and
vowing to destroy the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins
told reporters that three jihadist cells staged co-ordinated hits at
bars, a concert hall and soccer stadium killing 129 people and injuring
352, including 99 who were in a serious condition.
Museums
and theatres remained shuttered in Paris for a second day on Sunday,
with hundreds of soldiers and police patrolling the streets and metro
stations after French President Francois Hollande declared a state of emergency.
Seven
gunmen, all of whom were wearing suicide vests packed with explosives,
died in the multiple assaults. The first to be identified was named as Ismael Omar Mostefai, a 29-year-old who lived in the city of Chartres, southwest of Paris.
French
media said he was French-born and of Algerian descent. Molins said the
man had a security file for Islamist radicalisation, adding that he had a
criminal record but had never spent time in jail.
A
judicial source said Mostefai's father and brother had been taken in
for questioning, along with other people believed to be close to him.
Another
source said police had found a car in a suburb east of Paris that was
believed to have been used in the assault, suggesting that at least one
of the attackers had escaped.
Prosecutors said the
slaughter - claimed by Islamic State as revenge for French military
action in Syria and Iraq - appeared to involve a multinational team with
links to the Middle East, Belgium and possibly Germany as well as
home-grown French roots.
Greek officials said one
and perhaps two of the assailants had passed through Greece in October
from Turkey alongside Syrian refugees fleeing violence in their
homeland.
"We are at war. We have been hit by an
act of war, organised methodically by a terrorist, jihadist army," Prime
Minister Manuel Valls told TF1 television on Saturday night.
"Because
we are at war we will take exceptional measures. We will act and we
will hit them. We will hit this enemy to destroy them, obviously in
France and Europe ... but also in Syria and Iraq," he said. "We will
win."
France was the first European state to join
U.S. air strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq in September
2014, while a year later it extended its air strikes to Syria.
It had already scheduled to send an aircraft carrier to the region later this month.
YOUNG VICTIMS
The
names of the first victims have started to filter out on social media,
many of them young people who were out enjoying themselves on a Friday
night. The dead included one U.S. citizen, one Swede, one Briton, two
Belgians, two Romanians and two Mexicans, their governments said.
In
the worst carnage, three gunmen systematically killed at least 89
people at a rock concert by an American band at the Bataclan theatre
before detonating explosive belts as anti-terrorist commandos launched
an assault.
It was the deadliest attack in France
since World War Two and the worst such assault in Europe since the
Madrid train bombings of 2004, in which Islamists killed 191 people.
Quoting
an unnamed senior official, Israeli television said Israel's spy
services saw a "clear operational link" between the Paris mayhem,
suicide bombings in Beirut on Thursday, which killed 43, and the Oct. 31
downing of a Russian airliner in the Egyptian Sinai, where 224 people
died.
France had been on high alert since Islamist
gunmen attacked the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a kosher
supermarket in January, killing 18 people.
Those
attacks briefly united France in defence of freedom of speech, with a
mass demonstration of more than a million people. But that unity has
since broken down, with far-right populist Marine Le Pen gaining on both
mainstream parties by blaming France's security problems on immigration
and Islam.
If confirmed, the infiltration of
militants into the flow of refugees to carry out attacks in Europe could
have far-reaching political consequences.
The
attacks fuelled a debate raging in Europe about how to handle the influx
of hundreds of thousands of refugees and other migrants propelled by
civil war in Syria, Iraq and Libya.
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