Mourners on Tuesday reflected in the bullet-pierced glass of Le Carillon, the scene of one of the attacks in Paris.Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
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PARIS — A dragnet across Europe widened on Tuesday to include a second fugitive suspected of having taken part in the Paris terrorist attacks, as officials tried to make sense of a torrent of emerging intelligence about the planning and execution of the attacks.
and Belgium continued their pursuit of one fugitive, Salah Abdeslam, 26, a Frenchman who is believed to have escaped to Brussels, while two French officials — who were briefed on the investigation but were not authorized to discuss operational details — said on Tuesday evening that the authorities were looking for an accomplice who was directly involved in the attacks.
Seven attackers died in the assaults on Friday night, but it now appears that at least nine took part or played some role.
Some of the attackers, who killed 129 people in a closely coordinated series of assaults that lasted three hours, rented a house in the northeast Paris suburb of Bobigny last week, telling the landlady they were businessmen from Belgium, and a hotel suite in the southeast Paris suburb of Alfortville, officials said.
The Paris Attackers: Who Were They?
A snapshot of seven men suspected in Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who is believed to have been the architect of the assaults.
The person suspected of organizing the attacks — a Belgian militant named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is 27 or 28 — is believed to be in Syria with fellow Islamic State militants, French and American intelligence officials have concluded.
Early Tuesday, 10 French fighter jets, taking off from bases in Jordan and the Persian Gulf, dropped 16 bombs on what the French Defense Ministry described as an Islamic State command center and training center in the group’s self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa, Syria. Hours later, Russia carried out an attack on Raqqa with cruise missiles and long-range bombers, after acknowledging that a terrorist bomb brought down a Russian jetliner over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt — a hotbed of Islamic State activity — on Oct. 31.
France, through its defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, took the extraordinary step on Tuesday of invoking a European Union treaty that obliges members to help any member that is “the victim of armed aggression on its territory.”
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President François Hollande took steps to shore up global support for what he has called a war to annihilate the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. He met with Secretary of State John Kerry, who expressed sympathy but reiterated the Obama administration’s view that the group would not be destroyed until Syria’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, leaves power. Mr. Hollande will visit Washington and Moscow next week to meet with Mr. Obama and the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament that the Paris attacks had strengthened the case for intervening against the Islamic State in Syria, a move that Parliament rejected in 2013.