PARIS // France has banned three Muslim associations which ran a mosque in the Paris area shut down following November’s extremist attacks on the capital, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Wednesday.
The mosque at Lagny-sur-Marne was closed in early December as part of a huge security crackdown after 130 people were killed in a coordinated series of shootings and suicide bombings in Paris on November 13. ISIL claimed the attacks.
“There is no place in the French Republic for groups which incite, and which call for terrorism or call for hate,” Cazeneuve said as he announced the decision on Wednesday.
The main group was is called “Retour aux Sources”, which loosely translates as “Back to our roots”.
Meanwhile in Belgium, police have identified three safe houses used by key suspects including presumed ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud as they plotted the deadly Paris attacks, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
The premises include a flat in Charleroi, a town south of the capital Brussels where a major airport is located, a house in the rural village of Auvelais near the French border, and a flat in Brussels.
“The investigators were able to identify three premises that have been used by the conspiring perpetrators of the attacks of 13th November 2015,” Eric Van Der Sypt, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor, said.
French president Francois Hollande has said that the Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed were planned in Syria but prepared and organised in Belgium.
ISIL has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Belgian investigators found fingerprints from Abaaoud and suicide bomber Bilal Hadfi as well as mattresses at the flat in Charleroi, the prosecutor’s statement said.
Investigators say Hadfi blew himself up outside the Stade de France on the night of the attacks while French police killed Abaaoud in a raid north of Paris days after later.
Prosecutors announced last week the discovery of the Brussels flat in the Schaerbeek district, and said they had found the fingerprints of Paris fugitive Salah Abdeslam there along with traces of explosives and possible suicide belts.
But they revealed for the first time on Wednesday that they had also found DNA traces from Hadfi, precision scales and a drawing representing a person wearing a large belt.
No traces of explosives or weapons were found in either the Charleroi or Auvelais lodgings.
* Agence France-Presse
