Itongadol.- The leader of the group of terrorists who carried out the attacks that killed 130 people in Paris two weeks ago also planned to strike at the French Jewish community, Reuters reported Friday, quoting sources close to the investigation into the November 13 terror attacks.
The terrorists were also planning to disrupt the education and transportation systems in the French capital, Reuters said, adding that the comments were made to a French magazine.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, aged 27, was killed on November 18 in a police raid on an apartment building in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.
According to the report, the sources said Friday that Belgian national Abaaoud had “also boasted of the ease with which he had re-entered Europe from Syria via Greece two months earlier, exploiting the confusion of the migrant crisis and the continent’s passport-free Schengen system.”
The comments were apparently taken from a confidential police witness statement leaked this week to French magazine Valeurs Actuelles .
The statement also says that two days after the Paris attacks, Abaaoud asked his cousin Hasna Ait Boulahcen to hide him as he prepared more attacks.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said Friday it would launch an investigation into how the confidential statement was leaked to the press, Reuters said.
Islamist terrorists have targeted the French Jewish community on more than one occasion. In January, four people were shot dead in an attack at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris, two days after 12 people were killed in an attack on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in the French capital.
In March 2012, a rabbi, his two young children and another young girl were shot and killed by an Islamist gunman at a Jewish school in the city of Toulouse.