Citing a “serious and imminent threat,” Belgium has placed Brussels at the highest terror alert level.
The Crisis Centre of the Belgian Interior Minister said the terror alert level for the Brussels area will rise to level 4, which means very serious, while the rest of the country will remain at level 3. Residents are urged to avoid “places with high concentrations of people” such as concerts, train stations and airports.
The increase in alert level for Brussels comes as authorities investigating last week’s attacks in Paris conduct raids in Belgium as they work to take down the network of terrorists behind the carnage.
Salah Abdeslam, 26, is the subject of an international search warrant. He was last seen driving toward the Belgian border, when police stopped and questioned him a few hours after the attacks, not knowing he was involved. Now, his whereabouts are unknown.
Here are the most important developments:
• NEW: The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution penned by France that gathers international support for counterterrorism efforts, specifically aimed toward ISIS.
• NEW: Closed-circuit video from the night of the Paris attacks shows Abaaoud at the Croix de Chavaux metro station, a source close to the investigation told CNN Friday. The terror attacks were underway at the time of the video, around 10 p.m. on November 13.
• NEW: Two of those involved in the Paris attacks came into Europe through the same entry point in Greece and on the same day, the prosecutor’s office said. Both became suicide bombers outside entrances to Stade de France, one blowing himself up at 9:20 p.m. and the other at 9:30 p.m.
• Lawmakers approved a plan by French President Francois Hollande to extend until February 2016 the state of emergency declared the night of the Paris attacks. The Senate, the upper house in Parliament, unanimously passed the bill Friday. The National Assembly, the lower chamber, overwhelming approved it Thursday.
• Another person has died as a result of last week’s attacks, bringing the death toll to 130, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Friday.
• Three people are now known to have died in the police raid Wednesday on the hideout of suspects in last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, the Paris prosecutor’s office said, following the discovery at the site of the body of an unidentified woman.
The investigation and the raids
• Salah Abdeslam is the subject of an international search warrant. He was last seen driving toward the Belgian border when police stopped and questioned him a few hours after the attacks. They eventually let him go, not realizing he was involved in the attacks in Paris. Now, his whereabouts are unknown.
• French investigators said Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the Paris terrorist attacks, died in Wednesday’s police operation in Saint-Denis, a suburb of the city.
• Police conducted 182 more searches on Thursday night and arrested 20 people, according to French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. There have been 793 administrative searches in the past five nights, in which 107 people were detained — 90 of them remain in custody — and 174 weapons and €250,000 were seized.
• Following the terror attacks in Paris, the FBI is closely monitoring dozens of people they think pose the highest threat of attempting to carry out a copycat attack in the United States, according to FBI Director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. No relationship exists between the Paris attackers and anyone in the United States, they said.
• The Paris Prosecutor’s Office confirms that contrary to preliminary information from French authorities, Hasna Ait Boulahcen did not blow herself up during the raid on the apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on Wednesday. The prosecutor’s office told CNN it was a man who was wearing a suicide device that detonated.
• Multiple raids were conducted in Belgium in connection with Hadfi Bilal, a suicide bomber in last week’s Paris attacks, according to a statement from the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office. Nine people were detained. But the prosecutor’s office said Friday that seven of them had been released after being interrogated while the detentions of the two others were provisionally extended for 24 hours.
• A lawyer for Abaaoud’s father told CNN the father is “relieved” his son is dead. Attorney Nathalie Gallant said father Omar Abaaoud thinks his son was a “psychopath” and a “devil,” and he feels guilty about his son’s radicalization.
• A captain with Paris police’s Research and Investigation Brigade, which responded to last week’s attack at the Bataclan theater, described in an NBC interview the “hell on Earth” his team encountered there. Upon taking position at the theater, he said several hundred people lay on the floor. “Tons of blood everywhere. No sound. Nobody was screaming … and a lot of light because it was like a concert.” The people in the auditorium were lying motionless, he told NBC, “because they were afraid of the terrorists.”
• Video released by dailymail.com in London captures one of the Paris attacks at a cafe. A gunman sprays the front of the cafe and its outdoor bistro tables with bullets as glass shatters and patrons scramble to safety. The gunman approaches a woman near the front door and points an assault rifle at her. The weapon appears to jam, and the gunman walks off. The woman and another customer make a run for it.
The scene in France
• Young men are lining up at French army recruitment centers in the wake of the Paris attacks.
• France will push the European Union to strengthen external borders before the end of the year, Cazeneuve said.
Around the globe
• U.S. President Barack Obama has warned of the long road ahead in the global effort to defeat ISIS. “It’s going to be a multiyear task,” he said at a regional conference in the Philippines.
• The U.S. House of Representatives approved a measure to effectively pause the processing of Syrian refugees by insisting no refugee be admitted without certification by the secretary of Homeland Security. Many House Democrats ignored White House pleas to oppose the bill, giving Republicans enough support to conceivably secure a veto-proof majority.