PARIS — European countries agreed Friday to new steps aimed at securing Europe’s frontiers, as further evidence emerged that extremists in last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris were using the region’s porous borders to slip between the continent and the battlefields of the Middle East.
French prosecutors on Friday said they had confirmed that another of the suicide bombers who died in last week’s attack on the Stade de France had traveled through Greece, adding more evidence of how militants have been taking advantage of the same routes used by migrants to flee into Western Europe from the war-torn Middle East. The man, officials said, had apparently entered Greece on the same date and location – Leros island on Oct. 3 – as another attacker who had arrived with a fake Syrian passport under the name Ahmad Almohammad.
The name of the second stadium bomber was not provided by prosecutors. But two senior security officials briefed on the investigation in two different countries said the man had also traveled on a fake Syrian passport under the name Mohammad al-Mahmod.
Senior European officials meeting in Brussels agreed to implement a higher measure of monitoring at external borders, even as France extended its broad counterterrorism sweeps nationwide.
Today, European Union citizens – unless they display suspicious behavior – face only cursory checks when arriving on flights from outside the 26 nations in Europe that share an open-borders treaty. The new policy would bring more scrutiny, including thorough passport checks against European watch lists.
Nine persons were arrested in sweeps on Thursday in Belgium in connection with the Paris attacks. Seven persons were released Friday without charges, and two remained in detention.
The Belgian federal prosecutor announced Friday that a person arrested in police raids in Brussels on Thursday was charged with participation in terrorist attacks and participation in the activities of a terrorist organization. No additional details were released.
In Paris, French officials said Friday that a third body – that of a male – was found in the rubble of Wednesday’s massive pre-dawn police raid in which Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks, was killed. French officials now say that it was this newly uncovered but still unidentified third person who detonated a suicide vest in the apartment – not, as authorities had earlier reported, the lone woman in the group. She was officially identified Friday as 26-year-old Hasna Aitboulahcen. Prosecutors said a passport in that name was also found in the targeted apartment.
On Thursday, French officials said that a “non-European country” had provided information Monday that Abaaoud had passed through Greece, the single largest gateway to Europe for a record flood of migrants. A senior police official said that at least one of the three suspects captured alive Wednesday had also been in Greece.
Salah Abdeslam, 26, a French national now wanted in connection with the attacks, is also believed to have been stopped in Greece in August. Four other assailiants in the attacks are believed to have traveled through Europe to Syria, but their exact routes remain uncertain.
The confirmed death toll in the attacks rose Friday to 130, from 129. More than 350 other people were wounded in the carnage.
With Europe confronting a heightened terrorist threat, the measures announced Friday underscored a trade-off between security and the open borders that the European Union once held dear. Moving to shut down a network of homegrown jihadists who are slipping undetected between the continent and the battlefields of the Middle East, officials agreed to come up with a proposal before the end of the year to enhance abilities to track airline passengers. Currently, passenger list information in Europe is kept only for a month. But that could now be extended.
“A month to conserve data?” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Friday. “That’s definitely not enough.”
The measures were announced as a new terrorist crisis erupted in Mali on Friday morning and as France, still reeling from last week’s attacks, continued a swift crackdown on suspected Islamists by searching an ultra-conservative mosque on the Atlantic coast. In a sermon in May 2014, the mosque’s imam, Rachid Abou Houdeyfa, told a group of children that they risked being turned into “monkeys and pigs” if they listened to music. Police searched the mosque after obtaining a lead from a previous raid, according to local officials.
French officials said that so far, they have used broader powers under a state of emergency in effect since last Friday to conduct 793 searches, detain 90 people, seize 174 weapons, confiscate 250,000 euros ($266,500) and place 164 people under house arrest.
Authorities said the extension of emergency laws for three months was necessary to ensure public safety following the discovery of yet another terrorist plot aimed at Paris. Wednesday’s raid in Saint-Denis thwarted a plan to mount an attack in La Defense, a suburb northwest of the capital, officials said. But the extension has also raised questions about the curbing of civil liberties and freedom of speech.
In the neighborhood of Champs-Plaisant in Sens, a city 77 miles southeast of Paris, officials imposed a curfew from 10 p.m. Friday through 6 a.m. Monday.
Pedestrian and car circulation is forbidden, except for emergency vehicles. The restrictions were imposed after SWAT teams staged a raid leading to the discovery of unauthorized weapons and fake documents. The city’s administration said that “a few” people were taken into custody.
Within the Muslim community, religious leaders were divided on whether the French measures were going too far. Samy Debah, 44, president of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, said the government was casting too wide a net – and targeting some people who are innocent. He said one Belgian man, a convert to Islam who lives in the suburbs of Paris, complained that police wrongly searched his house, breaking items in his home before leaving.
“We’re going through a disastrous situation right now,” Debah said. “The government is making the same mistakes it did in January” during counterterrorist raids following a rampage by three homegrown extremists against the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
But Czzeneuve, the French interior minister, on Friday urged his counterparts in Europe to agree to fresh security measures, including more involved passport checks at Europe’s borders. He warned Friday that “we can’t lose any more time.”
Also on Friday, Also on Friday, France was poised to press the United Nations Security Council for a resolution calling on nations that are not already involved to join the fight against the Islamic State and asking those who are to redouble their efforts.
The draft resolution, according to the Reuters news agency, “calls upon member states that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures . . . on the territory under the control of ISIL . . . in Syria and Iraq.” The Islamic State is also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh.
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