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A woman has blown herself up and a suspect was shot dead during a police raid on a flat in a Paris suburb, while seven arrests were made.
Police targeted the flat in Saint-Denis in a search for the alleged mastermind of Friday’s gun and bomb attacks in Paris, when 129 people were killed.
The fate of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, previously thought to be in Syria, is still unclear.
Prosecutor Francois Molins said intelligence indicated he was in Paris.
All victims of Friday’s attacks – which targeted a concert hall, cafes and the Stade de France stadium and were claimed by the so-called Islamic State (IS) group – have now been identified, the government said.
In other developments
- US President Barack Obama condemns the actions of two dozen state governors refusing to resettle Syrian refugees as hysterical and offensive
- IS media publish a photo of what it says was the bomb which downed the Russian airliner over Egypt on 31 October, killing all 224 people aboard
- The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle leaves the southern port of Toulon for the eastern Mediterranean, to take part in air strikes on IS
The operation in Saint-Denis – where the Stade de France is located – began at 04:20 (03.20 GMT).
Speaking from the scene afterwards, Mr Molins said it had been ordered after phone taps and surveillance operations suggested Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, could be there.
The ferocity of the fighting at the flat could be seen in the impacts on the wall afterwards
Armed police sealed off Saint-Denis
Some police officers were masked
The prosecutor said a young woman – said by France’s BFMTV to be a relative of Abaaoud – had detonated her explosives belt soon after the raid began.
Another suspect was killed by grenades and police bullets, Mr Molins said.
Five members of the RAID police anti-terrorism unit were lightly injured while a RAID “assault dog”, a seven-year-old Belgian Shepherd called Diesel, was killed.
Three men were arrested in the apartment. Two others were found hiding in rubble and a further two – including the man who provided the lodging – were also detained, he said.
He did not give the identities of those detained.
Multicultural Saint-Denis: by the BBC’s Cagil Kasapoglu
Saint-Denis is a multicultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic suburb or banlieue. There are Africans, Indians, Chinese, Turkish and many more from different backgrounds.
Many have “sans-papiers” status – meaning they do not yet have a legal status and an ID which would allow them to find a job.
During my visit to Saint-Denis on Tuesday, I heard quite a lot of “us versus them” when people talked about the “Parisians” and themselves in the banlieues.
Saint Denis youths unmoved by attacks
As the operation got under way, roads were blocked off around Rue de la Republique in Saint-Denis, by lorry-loads of soldiers and armed police.
Local residents, who were urged to stay indoors, spoke of hearing continuous gunshots and large explosions.
Amine Guizani told the Associated Press: “They were shooting for an hour, non-stop. There were grenades. It was going, stopping, Kalashnikovs, starting again.”
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised the security forces for operating “under fire for a number of hours in conditions that we have never seen before today”.
BBC