RUSSELS: Heavily armed police officers wearing balaclavas descended on a Brussels

neighborhood on Monday in an unsuccessful search for Salah Abdeslam, who is believed to have
helped carry out the Paris terrorist attacks on Friday. Meanwhile, the authorities in France
announced that they had conducted sweeping police raids around the country overnight,
detaining 23 people.
The raid in the Molenbeek neighborhood if Brussels ended after more than three hours. Mr.
Abdeslam, 26, remains at large. His brother Ibrahim was one of the attackers who died in Paris.
A third brother, Mohamed, and four other men who had been detained were released on Monday.
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The authorities are looking seriously at the possibility that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 27-year-old
Belgian man now fighting with the Islamic State in Syria, might have helped plan the attacks,
according to a European official close to the investigation who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because the inquiry was continuing.
Mr. Abaaoud, who has been prominently featured in Islamic State propaganda, is thought to have
been the planner behind a terrorist plot that was foiled in January.
At noon, France observed a moment of silence in honor of the victims of the attack, which killed
129 people and injured about 350 others. The Metro and cars stopped and crowds gathered at a
makeshift memorial at the Place de la Republique and at the Eiffel Tower. President Francois
Hollande stood with students at the Sorbonne. Many recited the national anthem, the
"Marseillaise," after the moment passed. In other cities Delhi, Doha and Dublin crowds
gathered at French embassies to pay their respect.
As the country observed its second of three days of national mourning, law-enforcement
operations continued.
Under a state of emergency that Mr. Hollande had declared on Friday, the police are empowered
to conduct raids without a search warrant, and Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, said 168
such raids had taken place in 19 French departments, including the Paris region and in Lille,
Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse. The police arrested 23 people and confiscated 19 weapons,
including 19 handguns, eight long guns and four heavy weapons, as well as computer hardware,
mobile phones and narcotics. Another 104 people were placed under house arrest.
In one home in the Rhone department, Mr. Cazeneuve said, the police found a Kalashnikov
assault rifle, three automatic pistols, ammunition and bulletproof vests. Officers obtained a
warrant to search the home of the parents of one suspect, where they found several automatic
pistols, ammunition, police armbands, military clothing and a rocket-launcher.
Mr. Cazeneuve said that the investigation on the attacks in Paris was "making quick progress"
but that the threat of terrorist attacks "remains high." Six attacks on French territory have been
foiled or avoided since the spring, Mr. Cazeneuve said.

"We are using all the possibilities given to us by the state of emergency, that is to say
administrative raids, 24 hours a day," Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France said in an interview
on RTL radio on Monday. He vowed to keep intense pressure on "radical Islamism, Salafist
groups, all those who preach hatred of the Republic."
The authorities also confirmed on Monday that one of the terrorists who struck Paris on Friday
evening had entered Europe through Greece on a Syrian passport last month, providing new
evidence that the attackers used the flow of hundreds of thousands of migrants to further their
plot.
The Paris prosecutor, Francois Molins, said in a statement that the man identified on his
passport as Ahmad al-Mohammad, 25, a native of Idlib, Syria was one of the men who blew
himself up outside the Stade de France on Friday night, where the French and German national
soccer teams were playing, with Mr. Hollande in attendance. The passport was found at the
scene.
Mr. Molins said the suicide bomber's fingerprints were consistent with those recorded at a border
check in Greece last month but that additional verification was needed. The Greek authorities
said that the holder of the passport passed through the island of Leros on Oct. 3, and the Serbian
authorities said he passed through the border town of Presovo on Oct. 7, after entering from
Macedonia. It remains unclear if the passport was authentic.
The nearly unchecked flow of migrants into Europe from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other
countries had already provoked a political backlash before the Paris attacks, and word that one of
the bombers had embedded himself in the flow of people crossing the Continent with minimal
security checks could create further pressure to close borders and be less welcoming to migrants.