Subscribe
HipHopWired Featured Video
CLOSE

A Belgian man has been identified by French officials as the mastermind of the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, Nov. 13. Abdelhamid Abaaoud was born to Moroccan immigrants and  was actually behind a number of thwarted attacks as well.

Reports the Associated Press:

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.”

Belgian authorities suspect him of also helping organize and finance a terror cell in the eastern city of Verviers that was broken up in an armed police raid on Jan. 15, in which two of his presumed accomplices were killed.

The Paris attacks killed over 100 people while over 300 were injured.

You can consider Abdelhamid Abaaoud one of the most wanted men in the world.

Photo: AP Photo