A BLACK SEAT car used by the gunmen who fired at restaurants in Paris on Friday, killing 24, has been found.
Islamic State militants have taken responsibility for the attacks, which left 129 people dead.
Officials confirmed this morning that the car had been found by police in Montreuil, a suburb 6 kilometres east of the French capital.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said yesterday that gunmen armed with automatic weapons pulled up in that model of car before opening fire, killing 15 people and injuring 10.
Six people close to Omar Ismail Mostefai, who took part in the killings at the Bataclan concert hall and the first of Friday’s attackers to be identified, have been detained.
Among the six were Mostefai’s father, brother and sister-in-law, judicial and police sources said.
They are being questioned as part of routine efforts to verify information about the attacker, the sources said.
“It’s a crazy thing, it’s madness,” the brother told AFP before being detained, referring to the carnage that left 129 people dead.
The Seat car was used at two of the six locations attacked on Friday a bar on rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi where five were killed, and a restaurant on rue de Charonne where 19 died.
Police say that a number of Kalashnikovs were found in the abandoned car.
What we know
The seven attackers – six blew themselves up and one was shot by police – are the first to ever carry out suicide bombings on French soil and, unlike those who killed 17 in Paris in January, were largely unknown to security services.
Investigators in France, Belgium, Greece and Germany are now trying to find out who these men were, how they carried out such a vast coordinated attack, and why.
France
Police have identified one of the gunmen who blew himself up at the Bataclan concert hall, the scene of the bloodiest attack where 89 people were killed, as 29-year-old Paris native Omar Ismail Mostefai.
Mostefai, whose identity was confirmed using a severed fingertip, was known as being close to radical Islam, but had never been linked to terrorism.
Police said the attackers appeared to be “seasoned, at first sight, and well trained” and were investigating whether they had ever been to fight in Syria, where IS has proclaimed a caliphate along with territory in neighbouring Iraq.
Belgium
Belgian police have arrested several people over links to the Paris attacks in a huge sweep, including one who was allegedly in the French capital at the time of the attacks.
Justice Minister Koen Geens said the arrests were in connection with a grey Polo that had been rented in Belgium that was found near the Bataclan concert hall.
Witnesses in Paris said some attackers arrived in a car with Belgian plates.
Greece
Greek authorities have confirmed that a passport found next to one of the assailants belonged to a man who registered as a refugee on the island of Leros in October.
Greek police are not ruling out that the passport had changed hands before the attacks. French police have also said it is likely the passport was altered or is a fake.
Germany
German police arrested a man on November 5 after machine-guns, hand guns and explosives were found in his vehicle during a routine check on a motorway.
Bavaria’s state premier Horst Seehofer said there was reason to believe he had links to the attackers, and that the case “shows how important it is for us to have some clarity on who is in our country”.
However, interior minister Thomas de Maiziere rejected that link.
With AFP reporting
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say