What We Know About the Deadly Paris Terror Raid
Law enforcement authorities in Paris said they had broken up a terror cell that was preparing to act imminently in a raid in the Saint-Denis suburb before dawn on Wednesday. Authorities said they are working to determine the identities of at least seven alleged terrorists arrested and at least two killed in the raid. The raid began with France's anti-terrorism police storming the neighborhood, hunting for the suspected mastermind behind last Friday's Paris attacks. With nerves already jangled by last week's violence, which killed 129 people, Parisians awoke on Wednesday to find the northern outskirts of their city sounding like a war zone. Here is what we know so far about Wednesday's events, , Saint-Denis is just 4 miles from the Le Bourget district, where about 100 heads of state, including President Barack Obama, are due to meet on Nov. 30, for the 11-day international climate change negotiations, known as the COP 21. For days, Hollande has said he is determined to continue with the eventthe biggest in France in many yearsas a show of global "solidarity" against terrorism. Saint-Denis is a near suburb on the outer edge of the freeway encircling Paris's 20 districts. Its 40,000 residents comprise a large number of Muslims, many born in the Paris area, and in recent years it has undergone an economic revival. Abandoned factory areas were transformed into television and movie studios, and it is the site of major hi-tech conferences. It is also a short distance from the national stadium, the Stade de France, where three suicide bombers blew themselves up during a France-Germany soccer match last Friday, which Hollande was attending with the German Foreign Minister and families of the Germanwings plane crash earlier this year. France extended its national state of emergency, imposed on the weekend, for the next three months, allowing security forces to conduct sweeps and crackdowns on any people or organizations suspected of being a "threat to public order," government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said on Wednesday. The deadly raid was one of 414 since Friday's attacks. The Interior Ministry said that 25 people were arrested in overnight raids by police across the country to make a total of 64, and 34 weapons were seized.