The target of Wednesday morning’s police raid in a suburb of Paris is believed to be the suspected mastermind of Friday’s terror attack.
French officials believe they have traced Abdelhamid Abaaoud to an apartment in the Saint-Denis suburb, where there have been at least seven explosions today.
Abaaoud, from Belgium, was named as the man behind the massacre of at least 129 people.
He has previously boasted of how he evaded police attempts to foil his terror plans, before giving an interview to the Islamic State English-language magazine Dabiq which suggested he was in Syria. His whereabouts since that interview in February had remained unknown.
Belgian authorities had suspected Abaaoud, in his late 20s, of being the head of a terror cell which was smashed in January in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, before Greek police later arrested a man who matched his description.
In the interview he claimed he had travelled to Belgium to “terrorise the crusaders waging war against the Muslims”.
He also claimed a police officer who stopped him had failed to recognise him even after his picture had been sold to the media.
He said: “I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance!”
And Abaaoud claimed he was able to “safely” travel back to Syria.
“I was able to leave and come to Sham (Syria) despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies,” he said.
“All this proves that a Muslim should not fear the bloated image of the crusader intelligence. My name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary.”
Abaaoud is also believed to have links to previous foiled terror attacks in France, including one on a Paris-bound high-speed train that was thwarted when passengers overpowered a gunman in August.
He grew up in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, which has become a key focus for investigators.
Meanwhile, the Sun said that Belgian prosecutors are looking into funding links between Abaaoud, a now-defunct group called Sharia4Belgium and British preachers.
Eric van der Sypt of the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office told the paper: “We’re investigating that lead. It would not be unusual that these people have links between them.”