PARIS ATTACKS: Belgian jihadi Abdelhamid Abaaoud identified as mastermind behind attacks

Once a happy-go-lucky student at one of Brussels’ most prestigious schools, Saint-Pierre d’Uccle, Abdelhamid Abaaoud morphed into the most notorious jihadi in Belgium, a zealot so devoted to the cause of holy war that he recruited his 13-year-old brother to join him in Syria.

The child of Moroccan immigrants, who grew up in the Belgian capital’s scruffy and multi-ethnic Molenbeek-Saint-Jean neighbourhood, the fugitive, in his late 20s, was identified by French authorities yesterday as the presumed mastermind of the attacks last Friday in Paris that killed 132 people and injured hundreds.

What is more, one French official told The Associated Press, Abaaoud is believed to have links to earlier terror attacks that were thwarted, one against a Paris-bound high-speed train that was foiled by three young Americans in August, and the other against a church in the French capital’s suburbs.