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Gunshots and Explosions from French Police's Massive Raids. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired November 18, 2015 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


[10:00:25] ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning, I'm Anderson Cooper in Paris. Breaking news this morning. A massive raid north of Paris. Take a look.

Gunshots, explosions, thunder through the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis as police launch a massive siege on suspected terrorists. Seven suspects now in custody. Two people are dead. Two were of the -- two were killed in that raid. Among the dead, a woman who detonated her suicide device as authorities closed in.

Several police officers were wounded, but sources tell us the raid was just in the nick of time. They say this group was planning an attack and could have launched a second wave of terror on the city at any moment.

CNN so close to the raids, you can hear the explosions during a live report by our Atika Shubert.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Very unusual that they were moving in the crowd here looking for something and have now moved down the street. You can still see one of them here still operating. They're showing their photo to -- oh, and an explosion has just gone off. This is still very much an ongoing operation. That was quite a large explosion in that direction.

A second one now. Just hold on. No gunfire that we can tell so far. A third explosion. Fourth. That was much larger. Police asking them to move back. There are a number of military soldiers that are now being moved into the front as well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: I want to start in Saint-Denis this morning, the suburb where three raids have unfolded in recent hours.

Let's get the latest on those raids. Our senior international correspondent Clarissa Ward is there.

Clarissa, what's the scene right now, and then let's go back and talk about what we know occurred over the last 12 or 13 hours. CLARISSA WARD, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, hi,

Anderson. This is normally a quiet pedestrian suburban street, but just 12 hours ago, one resident told me it sounded like a war zone.

Now I want to try to pan over a little bit so you can see the scene here. Police have completely blocked off the street on both sides. In the middle there somewhere where you can see the fire truck and those firemen are two apartments that were raided. According to residents here, it all began at about 4:30 in the morning.

The owner of this apartment on the balcony that we're standing on told us that he heard gunfire. He heard grenades going off. And then he said police and military began to sort of swoop into the area. And it really culminated, he said, at about 7:30 in the morning. That's when he described hearing several loud explosions.

Now when we got on the scene sometime later, police shifted the focus of the raid to a church which is actually behind our position here. We saw those police. They were banging down the door. Eventually they wrenched it open. They filed into the church.

It's not clear, Anderson, exactly what they were looking for. They spent some time in there and then filed out. It didn't appear that they found anything. But in the two raids here behind me in those apartments, we know that two people were killed. One of them believed to have been a woman who reportedly either detonated herself or blew something up. We also know that seven people were arrested.

The focus of these raids is believed to have been the ringleader of Friday's attacks, 27-year-old Belgian, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. He is of Moroccan descent. He was also the ringleader of an attack in Belgium that was thwarted back in January. He managed to elude capture, and really he has proven to be a very elusive character. We know that French and coalition forces were trying to target him with air raids in Syria as recent as a month ago. Yet now it appears it is possible that he is right here in the capital of Paris.

Still no word on his whereabouts. But residents here deeply shaken up by what has happened, Anderson. This is Paris, France. This is central Europe. People here told me they had never seen anything like this -- Anderson.

[10:05:05] COOPER: Yes. I mean, Clarissa, as -- you know, as soon as yesterday, we were being told this guy, this alleged ringleader, was likely still in Syria. The idea is shocking, I think, to many French that he could be here, in fact, in Paris this close to where the attacks took place on Friday. Do we know what this group, this cell, if that's what it was, or what these suspects may have been planning specifically?

WARD: We don't know specifically what they may have been planning, but we are hearing that it could have been big. And it is believed, as I said before, it is believed that this is all combined, that this is all related, that Friday's attacks are indeed related to whatever attack was just thwarted here this morning. And really, Anderson, this underscores the size of this network.

We've been talking a lot on our air about eight attackers. Then there was a ninth suspect. Now we're talking about a larger network, at least seven people arrested in these raids. This is an ongoing investigation, an ongoing manhunt, and it seems to be expanding, Anderson, by the minute.

COOPER: Clarissa Ward, appreciate that reporting.

CNN affiliate BFM is reporting that two of the suspects targeted in the raid were injured. They are now being treated at Bobigny hospital, which is just outside of Paris.

Our Poppy Harlow is there outside the hospital. She joins us now. What do we know about their injuries, Poppy?

POPPY HARLOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: What we know is there were two of them who were arrested in the early morning hours, as Clarissa described to you. Came here to Bobigny hospital in the north of Paris. We're about 30 minutes from where you are, Anderson. We know both were wounded to the arm, one more seriously so. The one who was more seriously injured arrived here about 11:45 a.m. local time, went immediately into surgery.

We also can report new information coming to us from our affiliate BFM that one of those who was injured, presumably the one less so, has already been transported with many, many police and armored vehicles around them. Transported out of this hospital. The question is, where was that man taken for interrogation?

Just to set the scene for you here, was the ringleader, Abaaoud, was he arrested? That is a question that we don't know. Was he in that apartment? Was he one of the men who was injured and taken here? That is possible. What is so critical now for these doctors here is that they are able to keep the men alive so that they can be interrogated because they will have answers as to how big this web really is.

Perhaps what was the next attack that Clarissa was reporting was planned that could have been extremely large. That's the focus right now. What information can they get from these two men?

When we got out of the taxicab, Anderson, in front of here, they immediately, the police immediately approached us with assault rifles. They told our taxi driver to keep moving, keep moving, don't stop. We jumped out and we were escorted across the street. They don't want us in shops or anywhere near the front of the hospital speaking to the police. There is nothing that they can tell us directly. Security incredibly high here.

Again, two of those suspects treated here. One already transported with armored vehicles by police out of here. The other one presumably still inside undergoing surgery.

COOPER: Poppy Harlow reporting. Poppy, thank you very much. Security tight all throughout Paris, obviously. I was in a

neighborhood yesterday, saw somebody just getting out of a subway, police just went up to him, had him hold up his hands, just random searches in many parts of this city.

This morning we're also learning that a cell phone recovered after Friday's attacks may have provided some critical information for today's raid.

Joining me now to talk about all of this is CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto.

You know, for our viewers, there's -- it is confusing kind of keeping track of how many people are involved in this. And maybe let's step back a second. Friday's raids, Friday's attacks, it was believed there were eight terrorists involved and that seven of them were killed in the attacks. One of them was believed to have gotten away. There's an international manhunt out for him. It was believed he had returned to belgium, though his whereabouts are at this point not clear. But now this raid today, that's a different group, seven people taken into custody there. Two people killed in those raids. And again, two different people who police are now looking for.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: The simplest way to think about today's raids is that we have just doubled the number of active terrorists somehow related to these attacks because on Friday, you had a number of eight or nine, initially they said seven killed, one still missing, then they added last night another person that they were looking for, unidentified. This morning, you now have nine people in that apartment, seven arrested, two killed. Planning, say police, an imminent attack.

So that was not a support network. These were active terrorists, an active cell. That you and I very easily right now could be talking about a second attack that took place this morning as opposed to a successful raid. And I think that, you know, in the scheme of things, the nervousness and the alert, this is good news, right?

[10:10:05] I mean, this was good, urgent police work that appears to have prevented an attack. But at the same time, it shows you what French officials have been warning from the beginning, that the folks who died on Friday, it doesn't end there, that there are others out there and that's significant and concerning.

COOPER: Let's talk about the two main people whose names we know who are still out there. One, there's this international manhunt out for this man who --

SCIUTTO: Saleh Abdeslam.

COOPER: Right. Who's referred to really as the eighth terrorist who's involved in Friday's attacks. Do we know what his connection is to the other man who believed to be the ringleader of all of this?

SCIUTTO: This is new information. We're finding out -- we've talked about the ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. The connection he has to this missing -- this eighth attacker from Friday, is they served in prison together in 2011 in Belgium.

COOPER: And we're hearing this now for the first time.

SCIUTTO: This is new information. What's significant about this is that prisons are often the incubators of radicalization. And many of the plotters already we know, the ones killed on Friday and others arrested, start as petty criminals. They had arrests for pick- pocketing, for robbery, et cetera. They go to prison. I'm not saying that's the only place they could be radicalized, but it is often a place they're radicalized. And they make connections and continue on.

And so now we know a very key connection in these attacks between a missing presumed attacker from Friday and the alleged ringleader is that they met in prison in 2011. That's significant.

COOPER: Very interesting indeed. The question is how much communication has there been between them? Did the cell phone that was discovered during the Bataclan attacks or in the wake of that, is that what led people to this apartment?

SCIUTTO: It is key. I'm told that -- and police have said this, that intercepted communications led them to these apartments this morning. These apartments under surveillance just for the last 24 hours. So we know that that clue, that information, that intelligence was new. It was fresh. It was urgent. And I know that some of those intercepted communications that have made a difference that have been a clue leading to this second cell were from those phones found near the bodies of these actors who carried out the attacks on Friday.

COOPER: And we're also joined by terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank. What are you learning about the raids this morning?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Hey, Anderson. I've just been speaking to a senior Belgian counterterrorism official, and he's provided CNN with a lot of new, important information about this investigation including what led to this raid at Saint-Denis overnight. And that was, indeed, as Jim was saying, that was indeed an intercepted communication, the intercepted communication, the wiretap, suggested that a relative of Abdelhamid Abaaoud was at the residence in Saint-Denis.

Separately, the French also had other strong indications that Abdelhamid Abaaoud was in Paris. They put all that together, and they launched this raid in Saint-Denis against this residence. When they went in, they were met with fierce resistance, extraordinary resistance from the people inside the building. So the French security commandos had to resort to heavy munitions to neutralize these suspects.

They blew up a lot of the building, a whole floor came down. And there were a lot of body remains scattered around the wreckage, making identification very difficult. They're now efforting DNA analysis on the people who were killed inside the building to see if one of those people was Abdelhamid Abaaoud. They do not know yet whether Abdelhamid Abaaoud was one of people killed. They're looking into that efforting all of that right now. I also have key information from this same official on that wider

network that is thought to be behind the Paris terrorist attacks. It seems that there were several brains, according to this official, they suspect there were several brains behind it, not only Abdelhamid Abaaoud, but also a senior French ISIS operative called Fabian Clan.

Now Fabian Clan's voice was heard on the ISIS claim of responsibility which quickly followed these attacks in Paris. The Belgians believe that Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Fabian Clan were working together in and around Raqqa, Syria, to recruit Belgian-French recruits coming in and to send them back to launch attacks. And they would turn these recruits around very, very quickly, giving them perhaps sometimes just one or two weeks of training, then sending them back to Europe to launch attacks.

They're both believed to be behind those attempted attacks on that passenger train, also churches in Paris in April. Another key piece of information from Belgian counterterrorism officials is that the bombmaker in this Paris attack still believed to be at large, Anderson.

[10:15:16] COOPER: Paul Cruickshank, stay with us. We're going to take a short break. I want to come back to you, though, on the other side of this break because there's a lot -- you just gave us a lot of new information. I just want to drill down on a number of the key pieces with our Jim Sciutto and with Paul.

So, Paul, if you could just stick around. We'll also take a look at more airstrikes attacking ISIS targets. The question is, is it enough? We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: As you know, there have been dramatic raids early this morning here in Paris. Seven arrested, two dead.

[10:20:02] Of those seven arrested, two were hospitalized with some wounds. Targeted the person believed to be a ringleader of the attack. But we don't know, really, the result of that raid. But our CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank has gotten some new information. I want to go back to him. We're also joined here by Jim Sciutto, here at the Plaza de la Republique.

Paul, just -- let's talk again about what you just reported because you gave us a lot of new information. This is based on a conversation -- again, who was this conversation with, and if you could just bring us up to speed again?

CRUICKSHANK: Well, Anderson, as I was saying, this comes from a senior Belgian counterterrorism investigation, somebody at the heart of the investigation. The Belgians and the French are working hand in hand on this investigation. And as I was saying, the key thing that led to this residence in Saint-Denis overnight was an intercepted communication, a wiretap, indicating that a relative of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of this plot, was at that address in Saint-Denis. The French also separately had other strong information suggesting

Abaaoud was actually in Paris. So they went in and launched this raid, French commandos, but they were met with fierce resistance by the people inside the building. Such fierce resistance that the French commandos had to resort to what were described to me as the weapons of war, munitions, grenades, that they had to use to neutralize the suspects inside the building.

One of those suspects, a female suicide bomber, blew herself up. I mean, this was quite a firefight that went down. But because the French had to use heavy force, heavy munitions against the building, some of the building collapsed. At least one floor collapsed. There was a lot of rubble. There were body parts everywhere from the suspects. And that made identification difficult of who was inside the building.

And so they are now efforting DNA analysis to see whether, indeed, Abdelhamid Abaaoud was inside that building, was one of the people who were killed inside that building, Anderson.

COOPER: All right. So that's really fascinating because we know there were two people killed, or at least that's what we believe based on comments made by French officials so far. Two people were killed, one of them a female who detonated a suicide device. So that would leave one other person who at this point is unidentified. So again, we don't know if that is this alleged ringleader.

And Jim Sciutto, you've just been learning about the connection between this alleged ringleader and the so-called eighth terrorist who was involved directly in Friday night's attacks who's still out there on the loose.

SCIUTTO: That's right, the man who's subject of this international arrest warrant, Saleh Abdeslam, he -- that's Abaaoud, a Belgian prison in 2011. They served time there together in prison. This is key so often prisons are incubators of this. It's where these terror suspects build their networks, they meet, they become radicalized. That puts them together for some four years to build this relationship and provides a connection for this attack.

I will say, and sources have been telling me for some time that in these last 24 intercepted communications have made the difference. That provided the intel that led them to this apartment. I find it incredible that these guys would have been speaking on those phones in light of the -- you know, the efforts being put out there now by French security forces to find them. So that's quite remarkable.

But perhaps that speaks to -- because we know that the terrorists who acted on Friday, they communicated, at least in those last minutes before the attack because there was a text message discovered on the phone by one of the bombers. Perhaps they felt it was OK to communicate because they were close to another attack, as French authorities have said.

COOPER: Critically, though, what we don't know is who the -- one of the attackers was communicating with. We don't know where that text message was sent because the text message basically in your reporting was essentially saying OK, we're going in now. We're going to start now. That was the attack at Bataclan. But we don't know who that message was being sent to.

SCIUTTO: We don't know for sure, but I've been told the phones that they found by those dead attackers from Friday's attack helped lead them to where they were today. So it's possible that on the other end of one of those lines was someone who was in that apartment tonight in addition to other intercepted communications. But with that is it shows how quickly they are working on intelligence and evidence right now. You get an intercepted call yesterday, communication, they put the operation in place overnight, and they, in effect, neutralized this cell.

COOPER: And now because of a cell phone video, it's believed there were actually nine people involved in Friday's attacks.

SCIUTTO: That's right. So you have the numbers expanding on Friday. Seven dead attackers. Then you have the international arrest warrant out for the eighth. And then as of last night, they said we're looking for another unknown -- at least unnamed attacker. And then in the last six, seven hours, you have, in effect, the size of this group doubled because you have another nine people involved here, presumably seven arrested and two killed. An active cell.

[10:25:12] COOPER: And Paul Cruickshank, what's not known is how this person, this Abaaoud, and I'm mispronouncing the last name, Abaaoud, how could he who had supposedly been in Syria recently and even been the subject or the focus of airstrikes by French and U.S. jets, how could he now be in Paris?

CRUICKSHANK: Well, you've got to remember, Anderson, that he's got a track record of being able to slip away and to slip through. Back in January when he was the ringleader of this plot in Belgium, this ISIS plot in Belgium, he was actually coordinating the cell from Greece. And they actually managed to get on to his cell phone, but they weren't able to locate him in Greece. The Belgians even brought in the CIA back in January.

But by the time the international dragnet had closed in, he had escaped and gone back to Syria. So he's somebody that's got a lot of capability unknowst, on how to move around undetected, slip through borders. This is a guy who was involved in gangsterism in Molenbeek. In fact with both of these brothers were allegedly involved in the attack. All three of them involved gangsterism in Molenbeek according to Belgian counterterrorism officials.

And so they learned these kinds of skills forevading police, evading the security services, forged documents, imaginative ways to get in and get out, Anderson.

COOPER: It is interesting, and it bears repeating, I mean, a lot of these guys, it's not as if they're masterminds. A lot of them are just basically petty crooks and criminals. They have long criminal records of petty crimes and low-level crimes before turning to jihad. CRUICKSHANK: Well, that's absolutely right, but it's a skill set

that's equipped them well for organizing these terrorism plots. And one of the things they find it really easy to get hold of are weapons, Kalashnikovs. They have all the contacts they need from the days back when they were part of the neighborhood gang in Molenbeek. They were involved in this gang in robberies in the area. So it would be very easy for them to gain hold of these kind of weapons. And they've pulled off the most spectacular terrorist attack in the West since 9/11.

COOPER: Yes. Paul Cruickshank, appreciate you being with us. Jim Sciutto as well. We'll continue the reporting.

A flurry of police activity here in Paris. Gunshots, as you know, explosions, raids as French police search for the terrorists behind Friday's deadly attacks and this other group as well. The number of people now expanding.

Our breaking news coverage from Paris continues in a moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHUBERT: And an explosion has just gone off. This is still very much an ongoing operation. That was quite a large explosion in that direction. A second one now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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