PARIS MASTERMIND WAS BEHIND OTHER EUROPEAN ATTACKS
Once
a student at one of Brussels' most prestigious high schools,
Saint-Pierre d'Uccle, Abdelhamid Abaaoud morphed into Belgium's most
notorious jihadi, a zealot so devoted to the holy war that he recruited
his 13-year-old brother to join him in Syria.
The
child of Moroccan immigrants who grew up in the Belgian capital's
scruffy Molenbeek-Saint-Jean neighbourhood, the fugitive in his late
20s was today identified by French authorities as the mastermind behind
the Paris attacks.
Abaaoud
is believed to have links to earlier terror attacks that were thwarted:
one against a Paris-bound high-speed train that was foiled by three
young Americans in August, and the other against a church in the French
capital's suburbs.
'All
my life, I have seen the blood of Muslims flow,' Abaaoud said in a
video made public in 2014. 'I pray that Allah will break the backs of
those who oppose him, his soldiers and his admirers, and that he will
exterminate them.'
Belgian
authorities suspect him of also helping organize and finance a terror
cell in the eastern city of Verviers that was broken up in an armed
police raid on January 15, in which two of his presumed accomplices were
killed.
The
following month, Abaaoud was quoted by the ISIS' English magazine,
Dabiq, as saying that he had secretly returned to Belgium to lead the
terror cell and then escaped back to Syria despite having his picture
published.
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'.
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