Revealed: A Woman was Not the Suicide Bomber in the Paris Attack

 

French officials say the cousin of the presumed ringleader of last week's Paris attacks,  Hasna Ait Boulahcen, did not blow herself up in a police raid as previously thought, BBC reports.

They say the suicide bomber was a man, not Hasna Ait Boulahcen, who also died in Wednesday's raid in Saint-Denis.

Her cousin, alleged ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud was also killed. A third body was also found.

It will be recalled that headlines flashed around the world this week that Ait Boulahcen had become Europe's first woman suicide bomber, after officials said they believed she had blown herself up at the scene of the raid in a northern Paris suburb.
 
One of the dead has been confirmed as Islamist militant Abaaoud. The other has yet to be identified.

A source said: "The initial findings from the special police indicated that it (the suicide belt wearer) was her. But the skull we found on the pavement was not hers."

The fighting at the flat was so intense that not only were the police unable initially to identify the bodies, it took more than a day for investigators to establish that there had been three people and not two.