IS leader linked to Paris attacks ‘mastermind’ said killed in Syria

US military spokesman says Charaffe al Mouada was 'actively planning' terror acts against the West

By AFP and ToI Staff 29 December 2015, 6:48 pm
People rest on a bench after being evacuated from the Bataclan theater after a shooting in Paris, November 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

An Islamic State leader with “direct” links to the alleged ringleader of the Paris attacks was killed in an airstrike in Syria as he was plotting additional attacks, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Baghdad-based US military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren told reporters that Charaffe al Mouadan had been killed on December 24.

“He was a Syrian-based ISIL member with a direct link to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Paris attacks cell leader,” Warren said.

Warren added that al Mouadan “was actively planning additional attacks against the West.”

This undated image made available in the Islamic State’s English-language magazine Dabiq, shows Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was identified by French authorities as the presumed mastermind of the terror attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015. (Photo via AP)

Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, was killed in a police raid five days after the Paris attacks, along with a cousin and an unidentified third person, according to French authorities.

In Belgium, a total of nine people have been charged and locked up on suspicion of having helped the assailants who carried out the November 13 attacks in Paris, which killed 130 and wounded more than 350 people.

French police teams search for evidence outside a building after a raid in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, on November 18, 2015. (AFP/ERIC FEFERBERG)

Seven of the gunmen and suicide bombers who carried out the attacks died on the night, although only four of them have been formally identified.

Three other people connected to the massacre were killed in a November police raid in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.

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