France 24 tweets a chilling reminder about suspected Paris attacks mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud, now confirmed dead in yesterday's raid on a Saint-Denis apartment block.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the chief suspect in last week's Paris attacks, was involved in four foiled terror attack cases, France's Interior Minister says.
Abaaoud was suspected of organizing a January plot to kill a Belgian police officer. That plot was thwarted, and ended up with two of Abaaoud's co-conspirators being shot dead by police in a raid in Verviers.
The Belgian militant was also involved in plotting an attack on a high speed train to Paris from Brussels. That attack was foiled by three U.S. soldiers.
Abaaoud boasted in IS's glossy magazine, Dabiq, that he had fooled European intelligence services.
"My name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary," he bragged.
Since the November 13 attacks, the French army has seen a threefold increase in requests for information and applications to join through its website, from about 500 a day to around 1,500.
"This is a completely new phenomenon," said Colonel Eric de Lapresle, who heads the French army's marketing and communications for recruitment office.
The military did not want to announce the increase during the three-day period of national mourning in France according to the Le Monde newspaper.
Fears of more attacks are still high in Paris. with the city's Central Mosque announcing that it has called off an anti-terrorism demonstration planned for tomorrow, citing security risks, the BBC's Katya Adler tweets.
Only one of the seven suspects who perpetrated the coordinated attacks in Paris is thought to be still alive -- and he is still on the loose.
A manhunt is continuing for Salah Abdesalam, 26, a Belgian-born French national whose name was on rental documents for a Belgian-registered black Volkswagen Polo found outside the Bataclan concert hall.
Abdesalam's exact role in the attacks is unclear but he is suspected of renting cars and safe houses for the three Paris attack teams. His brother, Brahim, blew himself up near a restaurant after spraying bullets at diners.
Police issued an alert for Abdesalam on November 18, asking forces across the continent to be vigilant for a Citroen Xsara, registration AE-113-SY, which may be carrying the suspect.
Abdelsam was driven back to Belgium after the attacks by two other men, Hamza Attou adn Mohamed Amri, who were later arrested and the car seized in the Molenbeek district of Brussels. Abdesalam's two companions revealed they had been stopped three times by police on their way back to Belgium -- but were allowed to continue with their journey.
Abdesalam had called the two men at around 2 a.m. on November 14, saying his car had broken down. They picked him up about a mile from the Bataclan concert hall and drove him back to Belgium.
Nine people were detained during a series of raids in Brussels today to find information relating to one of the Paris suicide bombers, Bilal Hadfi, who blew himself up near the Stade de France, Reuters are reporting.
Seven people were arrested during searches of six houses in Brussels as part of an ongoing investigation into Hadfi, while a further two people were detained after three more raids in the Belgian capital relating more generally to the Paris attacks, prosecutors said.
The BBC's Julia Macfarlane tweets that a police operation is currently underway in Charleville in France, and there are reports that an explosion has been heard. It is unclear if the operation is related to the Paris attacks.
France did not receive any information from other European countries to suggest that Abdelhamid Abaaoud had entered Europe until November 16, two days after the deadly attacks in Paris, French Interir Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said.
"It was only on November 16, after the Paris attacks, that an intelligence service outside Europe signaled that he had been aware of [Abaaoud's] presence in Greece," Cazeneuve said.
In a speech to parliament, Belgium's Prime Minister Charles Michel has rejected criticism of his country's security services over the Paris attacks.
"I do not accept the criticisms which were aimed at denigrating the work of our security services," Michel said.
French President Francois Hollande said the attacks in Paris, which killed 129 people, had been "planned in Syria, prepared and organized in Belgium."
But Michel said that it was Belgian intelligence that led to the police raid on November 18 in a Paris suburb that killed Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of last week's attacks.
The Saint-Denis raid, conducted with "intelligence provided by Belgian teams," had prevented another attack, the Belgian Prime Minister added.
A lawyer who represented the IS militant suspected of masterminding the Paris attacks has talked to the Wall Street Journal, saying that Abdelhamid Abaaoud had been repeatedly arrested for violent crimes around Brussels.
Abaaoud had also served time in at least three prisons, his lawyer Alexandre Chateau said.
Abaaoud was arrested in December 2010 for an attempted break-in to a parking garage. His accomplice was allegedly Salah Abdesalam, the man who is currently being hunted in connection with the Paris attacks.
Chateau last saw Abaaoud in 2013. He had grown a beard and become more religious, Chateau said.
Religion "became a way for him to break out of his pattern of petty crime, aggression, theft...He didn't show signs of radicalization or that he would be implicated in terrorist acts of that he would fight overseas."
The Paris prosecutor confirmed earlier today that Abaaoud had been killed in the November 18 raid on an apartment block in a northern Paris suburb.