A woman whose phone tip-off allowed police to corner and kill the ringleader of the Nov. 13 assault on Paris has spoken for the first time of his plans for a follow-up attack and how he bragged about entering France with 90 others from Syria, reports Reuters.
The woman, in hiding and under police protection, contacted a French radio station to complain of what she deems insufficient support from the public authorities, and she also talked of the events that led police to Islamist militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
Abaaoud died when elite police laid siege to his hideout flat in Saint Denis north of Paris on Nov. 18, days after the Islamic State-claimed attacks in which he and a large group of militants killed 130 people in and near the French capital.
The woman said she was present when her friend was contacted to find a hideout for Abaaoud, and then met Abaaoud himself.
"I said to him: 'but you have killed innocent people'. He says to me, 'no they are not innocent, you should look at what's going on in Syria'," the woman, whose identity was hidden, said in the interview for RMC radio and television news channel BFM.
The woman met Abaaoud because she was a friend of his cousin, Hasna Ait Boulahcen, who died alongside Abaaoud in the police raid. The Nov. 13 attacks were claimed by Islamic State, the group that controls swathes of Syria and Iraq and whose positions are being bombed by French jets.
The woman said she learned from Abaaoud himself and further conversations with his cousin of his plans to imminently launch new attacks on a creche, police station and shopping mall in the La Défense business district on the western edge of Paris. She says that made her decide to call a special hot line.
"She tells me that it's for Thursday and I say to myself I'm going to stop them," the woman said, referring to the moment when her friend Ait Boulahcen told her the precise attack date.