The devastating attacks on Paris were a wake-up call to Western civilization of the evil that is the Islamic State. It also prompted leaders to act on every and all means of credible intelligence to find the people that did this and eliminate them.
Based on intel, the French government has identified the mastermind behind the Paris bombing and shooting attacks last week. His name is Abdelhamid Abaaoud and he’s a Belgian national currently on the run from every police force in the world.
AP reports,
The child of Moroccan immigrants who grew up in the Belgian capital’s scruffy and multiethnic Molenbeek-Saint-Jean neighborhood, the fugitive, in his late 20s, was identified by French authorities on Monday as the presumed mastermind of the attacks last Friday in Paris that killed 129 people and injured hundreds.
What’s more, one French official told The Associated Press, Abaaoud is believed to have links to earlier terror attacks that were thwarted: one against a Paris-bound high-speed train that was foiled by three young Americans in August, and the other against a church in the French capital’s suburbs.
“All my life, I have seen the blood of Muslims flow,” Abaaoud said in a video made public in 2014. “I pray that Allah will break the backs of those who oppose him, his soldiers and his admirers, and that he will exterminate them.”
However, when he could’ve been arrested in the past, he was let go by blundering officials, a move that simply emboldened him:
“I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance!” Abaaoud boasted.
There was no official comment from the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office about Abaaoud’s reported role in the Paris attacks, but Belgian police over the weekend announced the arrest of three suspects in Molenbeek, his old neighborhood, and were carrying out numerous searches there Monday.
Abaaoud’s image became even grimmer after independent journalists Etienne Huver and Guillaume Lhotellier, visiting the Turkish-Syrian frontier, obtained photos and video last year of Abaaoud’s exploits across Syria. The material included footage of him and his friends loading a pickup truck and a makeshift trailer with a mound of bloodied corpses.
Before driving off, a grinning Abaaoud tells the camera: “Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco. Now, thank God, following God’s path, we’re towing apostates, infidels who are fighting us.”
This is a sobering reminder that there are people in the world who would love nothing more than to kill us and our way of life because we’re free to do what we want. We must defend ourselves from this menace, no matter what.
(Source: AP)