BRUSSELS — European Union nations promised Friday to quickly tighten the bloc’s vast external border to prevent more violent extremists from coming in, and French authorities reported that a third body had been found in a Paris apartment raided by police.
One week after the coordinated gun and bomb assault that killed 130 people in Paris, investigators were still piecing together details on the assailants and how they converged in the city.
Prosecutors said Friday that they had determined through fingerprint checks that two of the seven attackers who died in the bloodshed had entered Europe through Greece on Oct. 3.
Previously they had said only one attacker had been registered in Greece, an entry point for many of the hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking asylum in Europe. That man carried a Syrian passport naming him as Ahmad Al-Mohammad, 28, though it’s unclear whether it was authentic.
The five other attackers who died had links to France and Belgium. One of the seven dead has not been identified, while a manhunt is underway for one suspect who escaped, Salah Abdeslam, 26. French police stopped Abdeslam the morning after Friday’s attacks at the Belgian border but let him go.
The suspected ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was killed in a raid Wednesday on an apartment in a Paris suburb with Hasna Aitboulahcen, 26, who said she was his cousin. Prosecutors said Friday that a third person was killed in the raid but did not release the identity.
They also said Aitboulahcen had not blown herself up with a suicide vest, as initially believed.
Meanwhile in Brussels, European interior and justice ministers vowed to tighten border controls to make it easier to track the movements of jihadis with European passports traveling to and from warzones in Syria.
“We must move swiftly and with force,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said. “Europe owes it to all victims of terrorism and those who are close to them.”
Cazeneuve said the 28-nation bloc must move forward on a long-delayed system for collecting and exchanging airline passenger information, data he said is vital “for tracing the return of foreign fighters” from Syria and Iraq.
French officials say they don’t know when and how Abaaoud entered France.
