The man French authorities believe to have been the mastermind of Friday's attacks in Paris, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was in Greece in January, the Flemish TV channel VTM of Belgium reported.
According to VTM, Abbaoud placed telephone calls from Athens to the brother of one of two suspects in a January counter-terrorism raid on a cell in Verviers, Belgium, an Islamist hotbed, in which Abaaoud is considered to be a leading member.
Belgian authorities in January had staged a pre-emptive strike on the safehouse in Verviers, killing two heavily armed suspects and seriously wounding a third, who were allegedly involved in plotting a major terrorist attack.
In an interview with the Islamic State magazine Dabiq, Abaaoud referred to the aftermath of the Verviers raid and the Greek angle.
“The intelligence knew me from before as I had been previously imprisoned by them. After the raid on the safe house, they figured out that I had been with the brothers and that we had been planning operations together. So they gathered intelligence agents from all over the world – from Europe and America – in order to detain me,” he was quoted as saying.
“They arrested Muslims in Greece, Spain, France, and Belgium in order to apprehend me…All those arrested were not even connected to our plans! May Allah release all Muslims from the prisons of these crusaders,” he stated
At the time, Belgian media had reported about one suspect who had returned from the Syrian battlefield and was located in Greece. The suspect had held suspicious telephone conversations with an inmate in a prison near Liege, the brother of one of the two men killed in Verviers, in order to coordinate attacks against police targets.
Greek police brass confirmed that Abaaoud had passed through Greece, without specifying exactly when.
Pangrati-Verviers trail?
The probe of the Verviers cell began between Christmas 2014 and New Year's, due to the suspicious calls placed from Greece to the inmate at Lantin prison near Liege, Belgium.
On 2 January, after the police counter-terrorism operation in Belgium, authorities tracked down calls from the Verviers suspects to their associates in Athens. Though the cell phone SIM card was no longer connected, a review of phone records found the calls to have been placed in the middle class Pagrati section of Athens.
At the time, Greek police had arrested at a Pangrati apartment a 33-year-old Algerian national named Omar Damas and two other individuals. An apartment in the distant Sepolia neighbourhood of Athens was also searched, with no known results.
At first, Greek police thought the Algerian was Abaaoud. Though the fingerprints and DNA samples did not match, Damas was in possession of a cell phone from which the suspect SIM cards were activated.
Greek authorities honoured a Belgian extradition request for that suspect, who had been in Greece since 2011 and had served prison time for theft.
Belgian authorities though believed Abaaoud had passed through Greece, and French authorities have sent their Greek counterparts all relevant intelligence.
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