Paris (AFP) - The fate of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks, remained unknown Wednesday after a massive police assault on his alleged hideout, the city's prosecutor said. 
 
 Paris prosecutor Francois Molins outlined a seven-hour raid of an "extreme difficulty" which saw police fire nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition in a battle with a group holed up in two apartments. 
 
 A gargantuan probe undertaken since the Friday attacks saw police pore over video footage, telephone surveillance and witness reports which led them to the apartment in the poor multi-ethnic suburb of Saint-Denis. 
 
 Molins said a witness report received Monday led investigators to believe that Abaaoud, a known Belgian jihadist believed to be in Syria, was in fact on French territory. 
 
 "This is an individual suspected of being the instigator of a large number of attacks in Europe," said Molins. 
 
 Wary about the report, investigators ran "numerous telephonic and bank verifications," he added. 
 
 View gallery Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins holds a press conference in Paris on November 18, 2015 (AFP Photo/A … 
 
 The police assault was launched at 4:20am (0320 GMT), putting Saint-Denis on lockdown as helicopters buzzed in the sky and snipers took up position on rooftops. 
 
 However police immediately ran into difficulty. 
 
 "The reinforced door of the apartment at first resisted explosives laid by RAID (anti-terror police) which allowed the terrorists to prepare their riposte," said Molins. 
 
 "Very sustained gunfire continued for nearly an hour," he said, adding that "the complex nature of the operation required the use of assault rifles, snipers and explosives." 
 
 The operation was further complicated by an explosion -- later determined to be a woman who "detonated an explosives vest"-- and damage done to the building which led to the collapse of part of the floor. 
 
 View gallery Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian suspected of orchestrating the Paris attacks, pictured in a February … 
 
 Another body "riddled with bullets" was found in the debris, but the state of the corpse did not allow for it to be identified. 
 
 Therefore, Molins said: "I am not able to give you a precise number and identity of those killed. There are at least two dead and verifications will likely take longer than expected" due to the state of the apartment building. 
 
 "A new team of terrorists was neutralised and all indications are that given their arms, their organisational structure and their determination, the commando could have struck," he said. 
 
 Three suspects were arrested inside the building, while outside police took into custody a man who lent the apartment to the jihadists and a woman accompanying him. 
 
 Two men were arrested after being found in the rubble. 
 
 An eighth man, who was injured and found outside, was also taken into custody believed to have been involved in providing the apartment. 
 
 The vast probe also led police to discover a cellphone belonging to one of the attackers in a dustbin outside the Bataclan music venue, scene of the worst violence, where 89 people were gunned down. 
 
 A total of 129 people were killed and 350 injured in the attacks. 
 
 The phone showed one of the gunmen had sent a message saying "we're ready, let's go." 
 
 The message was sent at 9:42 pm, before the attack on the Bataclan, Molins said, adding that police were investigating who the message was sent to. 
 
 "We can say that a massive logistical operation was meticulously put in place by these terrorists," said Molins. ||||| Gunfire broke out in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis early Wednesday as police pursued suspects from the terror attacks of Nov. 13. Witnesses documented the flood of police into the historic suburb as the raid grew. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) 
 
 The suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks was killed Wednesday in a massive pre-dawn raid by French police commandos, two senior European officials said, after investigators followed leads that the fugitive Islamic State militant was holed up north of the French capital and could be plotting another wave of violence. 
 
 More than 100 police officers and soldiers stormed an apartment building in Saint-Denis, a bustling suburb home to many immigrants, during a seven-hour siege that left at least two people dead, officials said. The dead ­included the suspected overseer of the Paris bloodshed, Abdel­hamid Abaaoud, according to the two senior European officials. Abaaoud, a Belgian extremist, had once boasted that he could slip easily between Europe and strongholds of the Islamic State militant group in Syria. 
 
 [LIVE updates from Paris and elsewhere] 
 
 Paris prosecutor François Molins, speaking to reporters hours after the siege, said he could not provide the identities of the people killed at the scene. A French security official declined to confirm or deny that Abaaoud had died. U.S. officials said they were awaiting confirmation of the identities of those slain. 
 
 The two European officials from different countries, who have followed the case closely, said they had received the information about Abaaoud’s death from French authorities. The two officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. 
 
 It was not immediately clear how Abaaoud died — whether in police gunfire, by his own hand or in a suicide blast triggered by a woman in the apartment. 
 
 [How officials may have missed their chance to stop Paris terror suspects ] 
 
 After the raid, forensics experts combed through blown-out windows and floors collapsed by explosions, presumably seeking DNA and other evidence. 
 
 Molins said a discarded cellphone helped identify safe houses used by attackers to plan Friday’s coordinated assaults, which killed 129 people and wounded more than 350 in a series of attacks at a stadium, a concert hall and restaurants across Paris. 
 
 Molins said police launched the raid after receiving a witness tip suggesting that Abaaoud was ­“entrenched” on the third floor of the Saint-Denis building. He said that neither Abaaoud nor another wanted suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was among eight people who were arrested at the apartment and surrounding locations on Wednesday. Three people were arrested in the raid itself, one of whom suffered a gunshot wound in the arm, he said. 
 
 Molins said the sophisticated militant cell used three safe houses around Paris — including the Saint-Denis apartment — and three rental cars to launch the attack. It was “a huge logistics plan, meticulously carried out,” he said. 
 
 Abaaoud was the target of a major dragnet in the international search — which stretches from Belgium to Syria — for suspects in Friday’s carnage. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Supporters of the Islamic State, the extremist group whose vast domain straddles Syria and Iraq, have vowed to inflict repeated attacks on the West, including in Europe. 
 
 The raid was in part a response to what French officials thought was a plan to stage a follow-up terrorist attack in La Defense, a financial district northwest of Paris, two police officials and an investigator close to the investigation said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief members of the media. 
 
 Seven men and one woman were arrested Wednesday in Saint-Denis, Molins said. 
 
 Five days after the worst violence on French soil since World War II, European nations remained on edge, enhancing vigilance against possible attacks by Islamist militants who have promised to bring the brutal tactics employed in Iraq and Syria to the West. 
 
 [Why French airstrikes on ISIS’s ‘capital’ probably haven’t done much ] 
 
 President François Hollande, seeking to reassure French citizens unnerved by the bloodshed on the streets of Paris, said the attacks would not alter the French way of life. 
 
 “We are at war against terrorism, terrorism which declared war on us,” Hollande said at a meeting of French mayors. “It is the [Islamic State] jihadist organization. It has an army. It has financial resources. It has oil. It has a territory. 
 
 “It has allies in Europe, including in our country,” he continued, “with young, radicalized Islamist people. It committed atrocities there and wants to kill here. It has killed here.” 
 
 He renewed his case to extend a state of emergency decreed after the attacks and to make changes to the constitution that he said would make France safer. 
 
 Jean-Michel Fauvergue, chief of the elite police unit that carried out Wednesday’s raid, said the operation began at 4:16 a.m. with an attempt to blast open the third-floor apartment door with explosives. But the reinforced door would not open properly, and the element of surprise was lost, he said. The terrorists inside then blocked the door with a heavy object. 
 
 French media identified the suicide bomber as Hasna Aitboulahcen, a cousin of Abaaoud’s. The 26-year-old French citizen is a former manager of Beko Construction, a company in Epinay-sur-Seine, a town north of Saint-Denis. The company closed down in 2014. 
 
 Fauvergue said hundreds of shots were exchanged and each side threw projectiles. 
 
 As the raid progressed, heavily armed police clad in military gear — some with their faces covered by balaclavas — moved quickly through the dark streets, while sharpshooters were posted on nearby buildings. Helicopters scanned from the skies, and police used a drone and two robots to conduct surveillance. For hours, traffic and public transportation were halted, and schools were shuttered. 
 
 Authorities say as many as 20 people may have been involved in the plot to attack Paris. Here's what we know about them so far. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post) 
 
 Uthayaseelan Sanmugan, a 38-year-old cook who lives near the targeted apartment, said he woke up at 4:30 a.m. to the sound of gunfire, went to his window and saw the lights from weapons outside. 
 
 “When I got to the street, I saw a lot of blood on the sidewalk. The blood of the terrorists.” 
 
 Residents were evacuated or instructed to stay inside their homes. 
 
 “I heard gunshots and, sometime around 7 a.m., a huge blast, an explosion,” said Kelly Ovo, a 45-year-old day laborer who lives close to the apartment that was under siege. 
 
 French police reported that a 7-year-old police dog named Diesel was “killed by the terrorists” in the raid. 
 
 Abaaoud, an ardent Islamic State supporter linked to several other terrorist attempts, was believed to be in Syria earlier this year. But some officials speculated earlier this week that he could have returned to Europe, perhaps passing undetected among the flood of asylum seekers pouring into Greek islands from Turkey. 
 
 The siege appeared to have been aided by another potential breakthrough in the probe: the discovery of a mobile phone in a garbage can near the Bataclan concert hall, the site of one of Friday’s assaults. 
 
 The phone’s data contained a map of the music venue, which was the target of the most deadly attack last week. French media reported that the phone contained a chilling text message sent shortly after the first gunman entered: “Let’s go, we’re starting.” 
 
 [The mystery surrounding the Paris bomber with a fake Syrian passport ] 
 
 The information on the phone opened fresh leads, including to an apartment southeast of Paris in Alfortville, according to Mediapart, a French news outlet. 
 
 French officials have cast a wide net in the hunt for suspects in Friday’s attacks. Across France, 118 additional raids were conducted overnight on Tuesday, yielding at least 25 arrests. That brought to 414 the number of raids launched throughout France since Friday, the Interior Ministry said. 
 
 The attacks deepened questions about European intelligence agencies’ ability to prevent militant violence. According to Eric Van Der Sypt, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor, Belgian federal police interrogated Brahim Abdeslam, one of the Paris attackers, in February after he returned from Turkey. 
 
 Belgian federal police also questioned Brahim’s brother Salah, who they knew had been radicalized, Van Der Sypt said. But Belgian officials said there was no indication that the brothers were going to get involved with terrorism, so they were released. 
 
 Across Europe, officials remained on high alert Wednesday. In Copenhagen, a terminal at the Danish capital’s international airport was briefly evacuated after “an overheard conversation about a bomb,” police said in a Twitter post. The terminal later reopened. 
 
 Countries, including Sweden and Italy, raised terror alerts. At the Vatican, extra security was posted in St. Peter’s Square, where Pope Francis addressed pilgrims. 
 
 On Tuesday, authorities in Hanover, Germany, abruptly called off a friendly soccer match between Germany and the Netherlands that Chancellor Angela Merkel had planned to attend, officials said. 
 
 Turmoil continued elsewhere in France on Wednesday when a history teacher at a Jewish school in Marseille was stabbed by three men. Brice Robin, the Marseille prosecutor, said one of the attackers had an Islamic State T-shirt. The teacher received medical aid and appeared to be in stable condition. 
 
 Also in Marseille, a young veiled Muslim woman was attacked by a man who punched her and wielded a box cutter. She was taken to an emergency room. 
 
 Since last week’s attacks, Hollande has vowed a withering French response. On Tuesday, France invoked a European Union mutual aid pact that calls for members of the bloc to assist other member states if they are attacked, a historic if largely symbolic move. 
 
 [The bombs exploded, and France’s president called it ‘war’. It was 1986. ] 
 
 Daniela Deane in London, Virgile Demoustier, Emily Badger and Karla Adam in Paris, and Loveday Morris in Baghdad contributed to this report. 
 
 1 of 32 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × See photos of deadly police raid in France View Photos Two terrorism suspects are dead after the pre-dawn raid in Saint-Denis. Caption Two terrorism suspects are dead after the pre-dawn raid in Saint-Denis. Nov. 19, 2015 French crime scene investigators are seen outside the rue du Corbillon building in Saint-Denis, a northern Paris suburb. Christophe Petit Tesson/European Pressphoto Agency Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
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 The long war against Islamist extremism has become more complicated than ever ||||| SAINT DENIS, France A woman suicide bomber blew herself up in a police raid on Wednesday that sources said had foiled a jihadi plan to hit Paris's business district, days after a wave of attacks killed 129 across the French capital. 
 
 Police stormed an apartment in the Paris suburb of St. Denis before dawn in a hunt for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian militant accused of masterminding the bombings and shootings, but by evening it was still unclear if he had died in the assault. 
 
 Heavily armed officers triggered a massive firefight and multiple explosions when they entered the building. Eight people were arrested and forensic scientists were working to confirm if two or three militants had died in the violence. 
 
 "A new team of terrorists has been neutralized," Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters on Wednesday evening, saying police had fired 5,000 rounds of munitions into the apartment, which was left shredded by the raid, its windows blown out and the facade riddled with bullet impacts. 
 
 "This commando could have become operational," Molins said. 
 
 A source close to the investigation said the dead woman might have been Abaaoud's cousin, while the Washington Post quoted senior intelligence officials as saying Abaaoud himself had died in the shoot out. 
 
 Molins said none of the bodies had been identified, adding only that Abaaoud was not amongst those detained. 
 
 In a sign too that Islamic State supporters were active elsewhere in France, a Jewish teacher was stabbed in the southern French port of Marseilles by three people professing solidarity with the militant group, prosecutors said. 
 
 One of the three wore an Islamic State t-shirt while another attacker showed a picture on his mobile telephone of Mohamed Merah, a homegrown Islamist militant who killed seven people in attacks in southern France in 2012. The Marseilles teacher's life was not in danger. 
 
 Police were led to the apartment in St. Denis following a tip-off that the 28-year-old Abaaoud, previously thought to have orchestrated the Nov. 13 attacks from Syria, was actually in France. 
 
 Investigators believe the attacks -- the worst atrocity in France since World War Two -- were set in motion in Syria, with Islamist cells in neighboring Belgium organizing the mayhem. 
 
 Local residents spoke of their fear and panic as the shooting started in St. Denis just after 4.15 a.m. (0315 GMT). 
 
 "We could see bullets flying and laser beams out of the window. There were explosions. You could feel the whole building shake," Sabrine, a downstairs neighbor from the apartment that was raided, told Europe 1 radio. 
 
 Molins said an initial attempt to blow in the front door in had failed because it was metal-plated, giving those inside time to pick up their guns and fight back. The confrontation was so violent part of the apartment was in danger of collapsing. 
 
 Another local, Sanoko Abdulai, said that as the operation gathered pace, a young woman detonated an explosion. 
 
 "She had a bomb, that's for sure. The police didn't kill her, she blew herself up...," he told Reuters, without giving details. Five police officers and a passerby were injured in the assault. A police dog was also killed. 
 
 FLEEING RAQQA 
 
 Islamic State, which controls swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, saying they were in retaliation for French air raids against their positions over the past year. 
 
 France has called for a global coalition to defeat the radicals and has launched three air strikes on Raqqa -- the de-facto Islamic State capital in northern Syria -- since the weekend. Russia has also targeted the city in retribution for the downing of a Russian airliner last month that killed 224. 
 
 The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Wednesday the bombardments have killed at least 33 Islamic State militants over the past three days. 
 
 Citing activists, the Observatory said Islamic State members and dozens of families of senior members had started fleeing Raqqa to relocate to Mosul in neighboring Iraq. 
 
 French prosecutors have identified five of the seven dead assailants from Friday -- four Frenchmen and a man who was fingerprinted in Greece last month after arriving in the country via Turkey with a boatload of refugees fleeing the Syria war. 
 
 Police believe two men directly involved in the assault subsequently escaped, including Salah Abdeslam, 26, a Belgian-based Frenchman who is accused of having played a central role in both planning and executing the deadly mission. 
 
 French authorities said on Wednesday they had identified all the Nov. 13 victims. They came from 17 different countries, many of them young people out enjoying themselves at bars, restaurants, a concert hall and a soccer stadium. 
 
 Empowered by a state of emergency introduced in France last Friday, police here have made hundreds of raids across the country over the past three days, arresting 60 suspects, putting 118 under house arrest and seizing 75 weapons. 
 
 Until Wednesday morning, officials had said Abaaoud was in Syria. He grew up in Brussels, but media said he moved to Syria in 2014 to fight with Islamic State. Since then he has traveled back to Europe at least once and was involved in a series of planned attacks in Belgium foiled by the police last January. 
 
 Two police sources and a source close to the investigation told Reuters that the St. Denis cell was planning a fresh attack. "This new team was planning an attack on La Defense," one source said, referring to a high-rise neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris that is home to top banks and businesses. 
 
 A man in St. Denis told reporters that he had rented out the besieged apartment to two people last week. 
 
 "Someone asked me a favor, I did them a favor. Someone asked me to put two people up for three days and I did them a favor, it's normal. I don't know where they came from I don't know anything," the man told Reuters Television. 
 
 He was later arrested by police. 
 
 AIRCRAFT CARRIER 
 
 Global anxiety was reflected in a flurry of new security alerts on Wednesday. 
 
 Sweden raised its threat level by one step to four on a scale of five, the high-speed Eurostar train that connects Paris and London briefly suspended check-in at Paris's Gare du Nord and several German Bundesliga soccer teams said they were beefing up security ahead of their matches. 
 
 The Russian air force on Wednesday carried out a "mass strike" on Islamic State positions around Syria, including Raqqa, Russian news agencies reported. 
 
 Paris and Moscow are not coordinating their air strikes in Syria, but French President Francois Hollande is due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Nov. 26 to discuss how their countries' militaries might work together. 
 
 Hollande will meet U.S. President Barack Obama, who says Russia must shift its focus from "propping up" Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, two days before that in Washington. 
 
 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Western nations had to drop their demands for Assad's exit if they wanted to build a coalition against Islamic State. 
 
 Russia is allied to Assad but the West says he must go if there is to be a political solution to Syria's prolonged civil war. Hollande said countries should set aside their sometimes diverging national interests to battle their common foe. 
 
 "The international community must rally around that spirit. I know very well that each country doesn't have the same interests," he told an assembly of city mayors on Wednesday. 
 
 A French aircraft carrier group was headed to the eastern Mediterranean to intensify the number of strikes in Syria. Russia has said its navy will cooperate with this mission. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Andrew Callus, Matthias Blamont, Marine Pennetier, Emmanuel Jarry, Marie-Louise Gumuchian, Jean-Baptiste Vey, Chine Labbé, Svebor Kranjc, John Irish in Paris, Alastair Macdonald and Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels, and Matt Spetalnick in Manila, Victoria Cavaliere and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles, Amran Abocar in Toronto and Dan Wallis in Denver; Writing by Alex Richardson and Crispian Balmer; Editing by Andrew Callus, Sonya Hepinstall, Philippa Fletcher and Richard Balmforth)
– Paris prosecutor Francois Molins gave new details on the police raid on an alleged ISIS terror cell just north of Paris in a press conference Wednesday. Some highlights : Molins said about 5,000 rounds were fired by police during an hourlong gunfight between heavily armed police and those inside the Saint-Denis hideout, the AP reports. Investigators found "a total war arsenal" of Kalashnikovs, ammo, and explosives, per the Guardian. Law enforcement was bombarded with gunfire as they tried to fight their way in through a reinforced door, the AP notes. There's confusion whether alleged mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud was among those killed in the raid. Molins said during the press conference that two suspects were dead and eight arrested, though he said he can't yet ID them, per the Guardian. He added that neither Abaaoud nor Salah Abdeslam were among those arrested. But two anonymous senior EU intelligence officials tell the Washington Post that Abaaoud was indeed killed during the siege and that forensic experts had gathered evidence at the scene after the chaos had ended. The suspected terror cell was caught just in time, per authorities. "A new team of terrorists was neutralized and all indications are that given their arms, their organizational structure, and their determination, the commando could have struck," Molins said, per AFP.