PARIS: A woman blew herself up and a suspected militant was killed on Wednesday in a massive police assault in Paris targeting the possible mastermind of France’s worst terrorist attacks.

Gunfire and explosions rocked the Saint-Denis area in the north of the city, near the Stade de France stadium, from before dawn as terrified residents were evacuated or told to stay home.

After a siege lasting several hours between security forces and a group of people holed up in an apartment, heavily armed police arrested seven people. Five police officers suffered minor injuries.

Elite police were seen hauling away a naked suspect in the streets near where three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the stadium at the start of Friday’s attacks.

After the raid, white-suited forensic experts swarmed the building where the windows appeared to have blasted out, as police tried to verify if Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of Friday’s attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people, had been inside.

President Hollande says no anti-Muslim act will be tolerated

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said a probe into the attacks had allowed police “to obtain telephonic surveillance and witness testimony which led us to believe that Abaaoud was likely to be in an... apartment in Saint-Denis”.

However, Molins said it was too early to say if he was among those arrested or killed.

Some of the survivors of the assault had tried to hide in the rubble of the badly damaged building, the prosecutor said.

Abaaoud is a member of the Islamic State (IS) militant group who was previously thought to be in Syria after fleeing raids in his native Belgium earlier this year.

Residents of the Paris suburb said they had been caught in a terrifying exchange of fire.

Hayat, 26, was leaving a friend’s apartment when the shots erupted. “I heard gunfire,” she said.

“I could have been hit by a bullet. I never thought terrorists could have hidden here.”

A man arrested during the assault said he had loaned his apartment to two people from Belgium as a favour to a friend.

“A friend asked me to put up two of his friends for a few days,” Jawad Bendaoud said. “I said that there was no mattress, they told me ‘it’s not a problem’, they just wanted water and to pray,” Bendaoud said before being handcuffed and led away by police.

Seven militants were killed or blew themselves up in Friday’s attacks on the stadium, a concert hall, bars and restaurants that were claimed by the IS group.

All of those killed in the attack have now been identified, the government said.

Police are hunting for two other individuals, including 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, suspected of taking part in the attacks with his suicide-bomber brother Brahim.

In Belgium, where some of the attackers lived, it emerged prosecutors had questioned the two Abdeslam brothers before the attacks “but they had shown no signs of being a potential threat”.

The attacks were unprecedented in France, which was shaken to its core for the second time in a year after 17 people were shot dead by militants at Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket in January.

President Francois Hollande praised security forces for their role in the “particularly perilous and taxing” operation which he said proved France was involved in a “war against terrorism”.

Hollande told a gathering of mayors that municipal police would be given more weapons and equipment. But he urged the nation not to “give in to fear” or excessive reactions in the wake of the attacks.

“No anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim act can be tolerated,” he said.

Meanwhile, the body representing Muslims in France said it would ask all 2,500 mosques in the country to condemn “all forms of violence or terrorism” at Friday prayers.

France is still under a state of emergency which lawmakers are likely to vote to extend.

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2015