The inside story of the Paris attack

CNN reports: The night that shook Paris started with three rental cars: three cars with three teams of terrorists maneuvering through the Friday evening traffic armed with the weapons of war.

A little before 9 p.m., a Renault Clio driven by Salah Abdeslam, the Paris plotter captured on Friday in Brussels, pulled up outside the national stadium. An international soccer friendly match between France and Germany was just kicking off and 80,000 fans, including French President Francois Hollande, were already inside. Three men exited the car and headed toward the stands.

One of them — Bilal Hadfi, a young French citizen living in Belgium — can be seen on surveillance video speaking into a cell phone. The other two were Iraqis who had slipped into Europe weeks before by posing as refugees. One of the trio was dressed in a Bayern Munich jogging suit. Concealed underneath their clothes were shrapnel-filled suicide vests held together with tape.

A few miles away, a black Seat Leon weaved toward the busy cafe district of Paris. The man behind the wheel, an already notorious Belgian ISIS operative called Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was on the phone speaking to Hadfi at the stadium to make sure everything went according to plan. In the passenger seats, two of his childhood friends, Chakib Akrouh and Saleh Abdeslam’s older brother, Brahim, clutched their Kalashnikovs, readying themselves. [Continue reading…]

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