A policeman stands guard near "Le Carillon" restaurant one of the site of the attacks in Paris after a crowd movement that led to a panic on November 15, 2015, in the 10th district of Paris. (AFP Photo)
French police raided hundreds of locations across the country and coalition forces expanded aerial bombardment of Islamic State targets in Syria as officials warned that terrorists are plotting more attacks in Europe.
Investigators conducted 168 overnight searches in all of France's major cities,
making 23 arrests and seizing 31 weapons, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in a briefing in Paris Monday. The raids came after police identified two more of the seven assailants killed in Friday's assaults -- one a French citizen under surveillance for links to extremist groups in Yemen and another believed to have entered Europe as a refugee via Greece.
The identifications provide new clues to investigators trying to establish how three teams of gunmen and suicide bombers could strike in the heart of one of Europe's most heavily policed cities.
French officials believe the assaults were directed by Islamic State in Syria using extremist cells located in Belgium. A Turkish official said France was warned in 2014 about one of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks, the Associated Press reported. Police in Brussels extended their crackdown on suspected extremists.
"We will act on all fronts to destroy Islamic State," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an interview on RTL radio. "We know that there are operations that were being prepared and that are being prepared again, not only against France but also against other European countries."
He spoke hours after 10 French warplanes, acting in part on U.S. intelligence, struck a command center and other targets in Raqqa, Syria, the de-facto capital of what Islamic State calls its "caliphate." France is the only European country conducting major combat operations against the group in both Iraq and Syria.
France's benchmark CAC40 stock-market index fell as much as 1.2 percent on Monday before recovering its losses. The dollar rose 0.4 percent against the euro.
The French bombing runs were among strikes by the U.S.-led coalition fighting IS. One attack destroyed 116 fuel trucks used by the organization near the Iraqi border, while others struck fighting positions and explosives caches in both countries, according to a statement from the Combined Joint Task Force, which is coordinating the international operation.
Meanwhile, a
manhunt is intensifying for Abdeslam Salah, a 26-year-old suspect born in Brussels, as investigators chase down leads in the Belgian capital. A road patrol may have stopped and checked a car containing Salah and let him go, prosecutors said late Sunday.
Prosecutors on Monday morning said the remains of a suicide bomber found at the Stade de France, north of the French capital, matched the fingerprints of a person registered by Greek authorities as an asylum seeker in October. A Syrian passport in the name of Ahmad Al Mohammad, a 25-year-old born in Idlib, Syria, was found with the body, though the authenticity of the passport must still be verified, they said. They said another attacker, French-born Samy Amimour, 28, had been investigated for links to terror groups in 2012 and stopped from traveling to Yemen.
"We are waging war against terrorists, at home and abroad," Cazeneuve told reporters. "The response of the Republic will be forceful. It will be total."
The total number of people who carried out and provided support for the assaults is still unclear, according to a French government official who asked not to be identified in line with internal policy.
The assailants killed as least 129 people and injured more than 300 in bombings and shootings at more than half a dozen locations in and around Paris on Friday evening.
© 2015 Bloomberg L.P.