The suspects: Clearer picture emerges as manhunt continues

Name: Abdelhamid Abaaoud

Age: 28

Nationality: Belgian

Suspected of: Unclear

Status: Wanted

French authorities are certain that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen from the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, played a part in the Paris attacks.

Abaaoud, who uses the alias Abou Omar al-Soussi, is a friend of Salah Abdeslam, the "eighth terrorist" who travelled from Paris to Brussels on Saturday and who is the subject of a manhunt. The two were imprisoned together in Belgium in 2010 for armed robbery.

Last February, Abaaoud boasted in the Islamic State (IS) magazine Dabiq of the ease with which he travelled repeatedly between Syria and Belgium.

In March 2014, he appeared in an IS video in a vehicle that was dragging corpses behind it. He is believed to have been the “brain” of the cell in Verviers, Belgium, that was dismantled a few days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Abaaoud was linked to a thwarted attack on a high-speed train in August which was stopped as it sped towards Paris when passengers overpowered a gunman, and an attack on a church in the Paris area.

He is said to have recruited his 13-year-old brother to join him in Syria and become one of IS’s youngest fighters.

He is well known to followers of IS and last year a video emerged of him and friends loading a pick-up truck and a trailer with a pile of bloody bodies.

Before driving off in the footage, Abaaoud told the camera: “Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco. Now, thank God, following God’s path, we’re towing apostates.”

His whereabouts are unknown, but the IS magazine Dabiq suggested he escaped to Syria earlier this year.

French officials targeted Abaaoud, along with Frenchman Salim Benghalem, in an air raid near Raqqa last month.

Phone records showed Abaaoud spoke to Mehdi Nemmouche, a returning French jihadi who killed four people in the Jewish museum in Brussels last year.

Three months ago, the French arrested another returning jihadi, Reda Hame, who said he had trained for six months in a camp near Raqqa and Abaaoud gave him €2,000 and encryption software and instructed him to return to France via Prague to avoid detection.

"All I can tell you is that it's going to happen very soon," Hame told French police. "It's a real factory [in Syria]. And they really want to hit France and Europe. "

Abaaoud may be linked to an aborted attack on a church outside Paris on April 19th and the attack on the Amsterdam-Paris train on August 11th.

Name: Brahim Abdeslam

Age: 31

Nationality: French

Suspected of: Suicide bombing, Comptoir Voltaire bar

Status: Dead

Brahim Abdeslam was named by a judicial source in France as one of the attackers.

He and his younger brother Salah are believed to have shot dead more than 40 people at four cafes and restaurants in the 10th and 11th districts.

Brahim Abdeslam detonated his explosives vest, possibly by accident, in the Comptoir Voltaire bar near Place de la Nation, at 9.40 on Friday night. But his mother said he “did not mean to kill anyone” and believes he may have detonated his suicide vest because of “stress”.

Name: Salah Abdeslam

Age: 26

Nationality: French (Belgian-born)

Suspected of: Unknown

Status: Wanted

Salah remains “the world’s most wanted man”. An international manhunt is continuing for Abdeslam who rented a car used to carry gunmen to the Bataclan music venue in Paris.

The French authorities missed an opportunity to detain their target hours after the carnage in Paris when he was questioned and released on Saturday morning.

Officers had him in their grasp when they stopped the car carrying him and two other men near the Belgian border. On Monday, Belgian police surrounded a suspected hideout in the search for him but came up empty-handed after charging into the property.

The arrest warrant describes Abdeslam, a Frenchman born in Brussels, as very dangerous and warns people not to intervene if they see him.

A third Abdeslam brother, was released without charge on Monday after he was detained at the weekend.

Though French citizens, all three brothers lived at 30 Place Communale in Molenbeek, the Brussels suburb whose population is 80 per cent north African Arab.

Name: Samy Amimour

Age: 28

Nationality: French

Suspected of: Bataclan concert suicide bombing

Status: Dead

The former bus driver from the Paris suburb of Drancy was one of three suicide bombers who burst into the Bataclan concert hall, where they killed at least 89 people. Amimour went to Syria in 2013.

His father Mohamed, then 67, travelled to Syria to try to persuade him to return.

Mohamed told Le Monde’s M Magazine of their “cold reunion” and said his son “did not take me to his home, did not tell me how he was wounded, or if he was a fighter”.

Amimour had been placed under investigation in 2012 after a failed attempt to travel to Yemen. He was required to report regularly to police. When he failed to do so, an international arrest warrant was issued for him in the autumn of 2013.

Name: Bilal Hadfi

Age: 20

Nationality: French

Suspected of: Stadium suicide bombing

Status: Dead

Like the Abdeslam brothers, Bilal Hadfi was a Frenchman living in Belgium, in the town of Neder-over-Hembeek. Flemish newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws said Hadfi was an avid football player who suddenly became radicalised in the spring of 2014.

He left soon after for Syria. In July 2015, he posted calls for attacks in Europe on Facebook.

Hadfi reportedly wanted to blow himself up inside the Stade de France during the France-Germany match, but was turned around because he had no ticket. He detonated his suicide vest outside the stadium.

Belgian authorities had placed the Abseslam brothers and Hadfi on watch lists, but the French had no record of these radicalised French citizens.

Name: Omar Ismail Mostefai

Age: 29

Nationality: French

Suspected of: Bataclan concert suicide bombing

Status: Dead

Mostefai was in the three-man team who carried out the Bataclan massacre. He was the first of the eight assailants to be identified, on Sunday, by a print from a severed finger.

It was claimed that Turkish authorities identified him as a possible terror suspect in October last year, flagging him up to their French counterparts two months later and again in June this year.

The father of a young child, Mostefai was a petty criminal with multiple arrests, but had never been implicated in a terrorist network. He is believed to have spent the winter of 2013-2014 in Syria, returning to Chartres in spring 2014 where he joined a small Salafist group. Mostefai has figured on the "S list" of radical Muslims in France since 2010.

Name: Ahmad al-Mohammad

Age: 25

Nationality: Unconfirmed

Suspected of: Stadium suicide bombing

Status: Dead

The identity of this suicide bomber, who died outside the Stade de France, is uncertain, because IS confiscates the passports of recruits when they arrive in Syria, and may have given a false passport to a European citizen to avoid his being arrested on return.

A Syrian passport showing his was born in Idlib in September 1990 was found near his remains. His fingerprints correspond to those taken by EU authorities on the Greek island of Leros on October 3rd and in the Serbian border town of Presevo on October 7th.

His death has fanned fears that jihadis are using the exodus of refugees to infiltrate Europe.

Name: Unknown

Age: Unknown

Nationality: Unconfirmed

Suspected of: Stadium suicide bombing

Status: Dead

The identity of the third suicide bomber at the State de France remains unknown.