A WOMAN wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up yesterday as heavily armed police tried to storm a suburban Paris apartment, where the suspected mastermind of last week’s gun and bomb rampage was believed to be holed up, police said.

    They said one man was also killed and seven people arrested in the standoff, which began before dawn and continued more than six hours later, when a loud bang rang out around the streets near the apartment building.

    Police said one person was thought to be still inside the apartment, but it wasn’t clear who.

    A senior police official said he believed Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Islamic State militant, was inside the apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis with five other heavily armed people when the raid started.

    The official said scores of police stormed the building and were met with unexpectedly violent resistance.

    Another police official said four police officers were injured. No hostages were being held.

    The Paris prosecutor’s office said SWAT teams arrested three people in the apartment. It said they haven’t been identified yet.

    Another man and woman were detained nearby, the office said in a statement.

    French President Francois Hollande held an emergency meeting with senior ministers at the Elysee Palace to monitor the raid.

    Investigators have identified 27-year-old Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, as the chief architect of Friday’s attacks in Paris, which killed 129 people and injured 350 others.

    A U.S. official briefed on intelligence matters said Abaaoud was a key figure in an Islamic State external operations cell that U.S. intelligence agencies have been tracking for many months.

    Seven attackers died in Friday’s attacks, which targeted several bars and restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall, as well as the national stadium. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the carnage.

    Police had said before the raids that they were hunting for two fugitives suspected of taking part as well as any accomplices. That would bring the number of attackers to at least nine.

    French authorities had previously said that at least eight people were directly involved in the bloodshed: seven who died in the attacks and one who got away and slipped across the border to Belgium.

    However, there have been gaps in officials’ public statements, which have never fully disclosed how many attackers took part in the deadly rampage.

    Meanwhile, French fighter jets attacked Islamic State targets in Syria for a third night. The French defense ministry said 10 jets had hit two Islamic State command centers in the militants’ base of Raqqa, Syria.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the missile cruiser Moskva, currently in the Mediterranean, to start cooperating with the French military on operations in Syria.

    In the German city of Hannover, a soccer game between Germany and the Netherlands was canceled at the last minute and the stadium evacuated by police because of a bomb threat. No arrests have been made and no explosives found.

    (SD-Agencies)

    (Read more on P6:

    Russia strikes IS stronghold 

    Two Air France flights diverted)