A bloody siege shows the strengths and limits of French security work

A VIOLENT seven-hour police siege ended this morning at an apartment in Saint-Denis, a multicultural suburb just north of the French capital. In an operation that began at 4.20am Paris time, heavily armed special police raided a flat and arrested seven people there and nearby. A woman holed up in the apartment, wearing a suicide vest, blew herself up; another man was shot dead by a police sniper. While the operation took place, the police cordoned off the area; schools and public transport nearby were immediately shut down.

After the operation Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, visited the scene, but did not identify any of those arrested or the two dead. The public prosecutor later said that the police raided the apartment because their investigation led them to believe it was a hideout for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen thought to be the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks on November 13th, which killed 129 people. Reports suggested that Mr Abaaoud was among the dead, although the public prosecutor has not yet confirmed this. (Update Nov 19th: The prosecutor has now confirmed he was killed.) He is aged 28, born to Moroccan parents and from the Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek, which was also home to two brothers involved in the latest Paris terrorist attack: Brahim Abdeslam, a suicide bomber, and Salah Abdeslam, who is also on the run from police.

Mr Abaaoud has been of particular concern to security services for several months, according to French reports, because of suspected links to three other attempted or thwarted terrorist attacks, including one by a heavily armed Moroccan gunman who was overwhelmed by fellow passengers on a Thalys high-speed train in August. He was also in contact with Mehdi Nemmouche, a Franco-Algerian jihadist who gunned down four people at the Brussels Jewish museum in 2014. Using the alias Abou Omar Al-Soussi, Mr Abaaoud is also considered to be behind a terrorist cell based in Verviers, in Belgium, which was dismantled in January after a wave of terror, including an attack on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which killed 17 people.

Mr Abbaoud’s name surfaced again in August, according to Le Monde, a daily paper, when a French jihadist arrested on his return from Syria told French police that Mr Abaaoud had ordered him to find easy targets like “a concert venue” in order to cause maximum deaths. “Over there it’s a real factory,” he reportedly said: “They are really trying to strike France and Europe.”

That Mr Abaaoud, of significant concern to French and Belgian intelligence services, could nonetheless have evaded detection raises further questions about Europe’s capacity to curb or thwart jihadist terror. Mr Abaaoud travelled to Syria in 2013, where he fought with Islamic State (IS), before returning to Belgium. In an interview with IS’s propaganda magazine, Dabiq, under the alias Abu Umar al-Baljiki, he boasted that he had foiled detection from “intelligence agents all over the world”. “My name and picture were all over the news,” he claimed, “yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary.” All this proved, he said, that “a Muslim should not fear the bloated image of the crusader intelligence.”

Other intelligence questions remain unanswered after the Paris attacks. Fully five of the eight terrorists had gone to fight alongside IS in Syria. How was it, for example, that one of them, Samy Amimour, who had been charged with association with terrorists in 2013, was able to leave France? What was the nature of the information signalled by Turkish authorities to the French about another, Omar Ismail Mostefai, when he travelled through Turkey and was on a French watch-list of suspected radicals?

France has robust judicial and security laws that give investigators fairly sweeping powers to monitor, detain and interrogate suspects. In the past these have been envied by their counterparts working in countries with stricter constraints. Yet the French now seem to be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers involved. Manuel Valls, the prime minister, acknowledged this week that fully 10,500 people in France are on a file known as “Fiche S”, meaning that they are suspected of being radicalised.

Assessed on a scale, they range from those who have simply looked at jihadist websites or met radicals outside mosques, to those considered highly dangerous. Only a fraction can be monitored closely, because it requires 20 agents to follow one suspect round the clock. As François Heisbourg, of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, points out, it is in many ways good news that people like Amimour and Mostefai were known to the intelligence services. The trouble seems to lie with the analysis of the risk they posed, and the follow-up.

This piece has been updated to include fresh information about whether Mr Abaaoud was among the dead.