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BELGIUm - FRANCE

Belgian police name three safehouses used by Paris attacks suspects, prosecutor

Belgian police have identified two apartments and a house used to prepare the 13 November Paris attacks and confirmed that the probable mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, stayed in the southern city of Charleroi before they took place.

Belgian police in Brussels last month
Belgian police in Brussels last month Reuters/Yves Herman
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"The investigators were able to identify three premises that have been used by the conspiring perpetrators of the attacks of 13 November 2015," a spokesperson for federal prosecutor Eric Van Der Sylt said in a statement in English.

Abaaoud's fingerprints were found in an apartment in Charleroi along with those of Bilal Hadfi, one of the suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside the Stade de France, investigators said Wednesday.

In the other apartment, in the Brussels district of Schaerbeek, they found material for making explosives, precision scales, traces of the explosive used by the bombers, clothing that could have served as suicide vests and a sketch of someone wearing a "large belt", they said.

Abaaoud's fingerprints and DNA traces of Salah Abdeslam, the Belgian-born man who is till the subject of an international manhunt for his alleged role in the attacks, were also identified.

The house, in the village of Auvelais, was searched on 26 November and several

mattresses were found.

All three had been rented in September and October under assumed identities and paid for in cash.

CCTV footage showed the Seat Leon later used in the Paris attacks in the vicinity of the Charleroi and Auvelais addresses.

A BMW rented by Mohamed Bakkali, one of the nine men currently in jail in Belgium in connection with the attacks, was filmed near all three places, according to sources.

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