The raids came in darkness, before dawn. Across the north and south of France, in cities and small towns, on residential streets and urban housing blocks – police descended on more than 150 addresses. Heavily armed officers kicked in doors. They shipped away bleary-eyed suspects. They also retrieved weapons: a rocket launcher, pistols, a Kalashnikov.
These police searches were part of what the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, promised on Monday would be a “total response” to the worst act of violence to hit France for 70 years. The state was striking back after a numbing weekend defined by grief and shock, following Friday’s murder of 129 people in Paris.
The operation unfolded simultaneously in Paris, Lyon and Toulouse, as well as in Molenbeek, a suburb of Brussels, which was the killers’ logistical hub.
The overriding goal was to capture Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old suspected terrorist, whose elder brother Brahim blew himself up outside the Comptoir Voltaire cafe. Both brothers are from Belgium.
Now Europe’s most wanted man, Abdeslam had hired the black VW Polo used in Friday’s murderous attack on the Bataclan theatre, in which 89 people died.
Tantalisingly, French police stopped him on Friday night in the town of Cambrai, not far from the Belgian border. At that point Abdeslam hadn’t been identified. He was allowed to drive off.
The trail led to a flat at 49 rue Delaunoy, Molenbeek – a post-industrial suburb of narrow terraced streets, with the odd bourgeois house, which has become synonymous with guns and jihadi mayhem. The raid went on for some hours. Dramatic footage showed police in black balaclavas advancing, Spider-Man-like, along the red-tiled roof of an adjoining building. Eventually, the armed officers were stood down. Seemingly Abdeslam had eluded them.
On Friday the killers opened fire using Kalshnikovs, drilling bullets into crowded cafes across Paris’s 10th and 11th districts. It seems likely the weapons came from Molenbeek. In January, Amedy Coulibaly – the Islamist killer who attacked a kosher shop in Paris – got his guns from the same area.
Meanwhile, in the suburb of Drancy in north-east Paris, officers stormed the family home of Samy Amimour. Amimour, 28, blew himself up in the Bataclan theatre. He was known to police before the attacks. His life was once ordinary; he had worked as a municipal bus driver, behind the wheel of the number 143. Then, in 2012, he quit.
On his housing estate, locals said they were were shocked, but not entirely surprised, to discovered that a suicide bomber had been among them. Amimour had attended a local school and was described as kind, gentle and normal.
He kept to himself, but would shake hands and greet his friends, they added. He lived with his mother, who worked at the local town hall, and younger sister Maya, 25. An older sister, Amele, 31, had left home, as had the siblings’ father, Mohamed, a clothing salesman.
At 6am the police moved in on Amimour’s home in the Place Marcel Paul, named after a Jewish resistance figure who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The estate is a tidy arrangement of low-rise blocks arranged around pedestrian paths. His flat overlooks a small railed-off garden. On Monday, clusters of teenagers were hanging around.
The portrait of Amimour that emerged was complex and sinister. He was once normal and ordinary, said Kais Benhamouda, 28, who had been at school with him, but that was before he became radicalised and before police raided his home in 2012. This was around the time of the attacks by Mohamed Merah, a French-Algerian who killed seven people, including three Jewish children.
Afterwards, on 19 October 2012, Amimour was put under formal investigation for “association with terrorists”.
“After his arrest, Samy changed,” Benhamouda told the Guardian. “He was a different person. He gave up his job and he left home. He said he was ‘tired of France’, he was fed up with the country. He didn’t speak much and was quite a loner. We saw him less and less.
“Then, about two years ago, I didn’t see him again. The rumour around here was that he had gone abroad, Syria. Nobody knew for sure, but that’s what we all understood.”
Locals were told that he had married in Syria, and they lost hope of him returning.
In December last year, the rumour was confirmed. In an interview with Le Monde, Amimour’s French-Algerian father Mohamed, 67, recounted how he had travelled to Syria in June 2014 to try to persuade his son to return to France. Their meeting, at Minbij, an Islamic State area north-east of Aleppo, was “extremely cold”. Amimour had been injured fighting in Raqqa.
“I gave him a letter from his mother,” said Mohamed. “I had slipped €100 into the envelope. He went into a corner to read it then gave me back the €100 saying he didn’t need money.”. He told Le Monde his son was no longer nicknamed Abou Missa (after his favourite cat) but Abu Hajia (war).
Back in Drancy, Benhamouda said he believed Amimour had become radicalised two years before his arrest in 2012. “We didn’t talk about religion, but he’d started wearing religious dress and was quite often at the mosque,” he said. “Everyone knew after his arrest in 2012 that he was being followed by the police, that he was under surveillance.”
Mouzammil Mohammed, 15, said Amimour would attend prayers at the mosque, set up in a local centre for the homeless and refugees. “When I last saw him a couple of weeks ago he had a big beard,” said Mohammed. “Every day he wore a long gown with a hood.”
At 6am on Monday, police came and smashed down the front door of Amimour’s home, a third-floor flat in a neat brick block. They took away three members of his family, including his mother and sister. “They also took a lot of white sacks that looked very full, but I’ve no idea what was in them,” added Mohammed.
He said the imam at the mosque Amimoura attended was from Mali and not a preacher of radical Islam. Benhamouda added that the problem was not the preacher, but those who hung around outside the mosque. “They try to recruit people going for prayers,” he said. “They talk about another, better world. Perhaps that is how Samy became radicalised. Their message appeals to people who are weak.”
Another 15-year-old, Anthony, a student at the local lycée who was wearing a grey tracksuit, said that before he embraced extremism Amimour had “dressed just like me”.
“He was small and stocky, with short-cut hair,” said Anthony.” He was always well turned out, in casual gear. He was just a normal guy. He worked for the transport company and drove the 143 bus.”
In neighbouring Bobigny, one of Paris’s gritty suburbs with a high immigrant population and even higher unemployment, police raided a semi-detached house at 48 rue Georges Tarral, on l’Abreuvoir estate. Locals said the police had arrived in the early hours of Monday, but did not appear to have found anyone there.
“They took away a lot of stuff,” said on neighbour. “One police officer told us they had found weapons, but I don’t know if it was true. It was on a very short let and there was a lot of coming and going. We were told someone had seen one of the cars used by the terrorists here, so maybe the house was a base.”
With five out of seven dead attackers now identified, including Amimour, it was evident that last week’s horror in Paris was predominantly the work of French citizens. Monday’s raids also included a preventative sweep of known radicals not immediately linked to the attacks, and residing in towns such as Strasbourg, Marseille and Roubaix.
Across the country, 23 people were detained and 104 placed under house arrest, said the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve. He added: “Let this be clear to everyone. This is just the beginning. These actions are going to continue.”
Addressing both houses of parliament in Versailles, President François Hollande said the country was at war – a war against the global menace of jihadi terrorism.
Understandably, the government’s rhetoric was martial. With most of the key perpetrators already dead, though, it was hard to know where and how to strike the enemy.
Five out of seven people detained in Belgium on Saturday were released on Monday, including including Mohamad Abdeslam, brother of the fugitive Salah and suicide bomber Brahim. Two more suspects were still being held on terrorism charges, Belgian federal prosecutors said.
Overnight on Sunday French bombers pounded the Isis stronghold of Raqqa, 2,500 miles from the French capital and its troubled suburbs. It was the biggest assault on Syria since France joined the anti-Isis coalition in 2014.
Was it a success? Isis fighters claimed that the sites struck were empty.
