Return to Transcripts main page

Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

DNA to Determine if Paris Attacks Planner is Dead; ISIS Claims Photo Shows Russian Plane Bomb; Honduras Seizes Five Syrians with Stolen Passports; Witnesses Describe Saint-Denis Terror Raid; The Saint-Denis Riots of 2005. Aired 4-4:30a ET

Aired November 19, 2015 - 04:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[04:00:00]

HALA GORANI, CNN HOST: Hello. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Hala Gorani.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN HOST: And I'm John Berman. Welcome to the special coverage of the Paris terror attack. This is CNN. We have been here all week.

GORANI: France is under a state of emergency, the first time the entire nation has been under such a state of emergency in more than 50 years.

BERMAN: Right now, French lawmakers debating whether to extend the state of emergency for three more months. The debate comes the day after the bloody and dramatic raid on two apartments in a Paris suburb.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GORANI (voice-over): Hundreds of police officers, special forces, military troops descended on a building north of Paris in Saint-Denis early Wednesday, looking for the man who is believed to have orchestrated the Friday attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. He's Belgian and he's believed to have planned all this. Investigators are trying to determine if one of the bodies in that building there is Abaaoud.

BERMAN (voice-over): There was so much destruction, they actually had to sift through the body parts and try to match the DNA if they can get it.

They say one woman blew herself up at the beginning of the raid. She was wearing some kind of suicide belt. She has been identified in some reports as Abaaoud's cousin.

Eight people were arrested in Wednesday's operation. But officials make clear they do not think Abaaoud was one of them.

GORANI (voice-over): Meanwhile, a newly released ISIS video is warning of an impending attack on New York City. It shows what appears to be an explosive device and someone zipping a jacket over what looks like a suicide belt. BERMAN (voice-over): Late Wednesday, New York's Mayor Bill de Blasio says there is no current, no specific threat to the city at this time. This is the kind of thing that ISIS says and ISIS does. Police officials have also told us they don't believe the video of New York City is anything particularly new. They think it could be file footage that ISIS got its hands on and produced this video.

GORANI (voice-over): So what they want to do, frighten and terrorize people. The group has also claimed to have killed two more hostages, one from China and one from Norway.

BERMAN (voice-over): The terror group posted the pictures of the men on its online magazine with the words, "For sale," below their portraits. Chinese president Xi Jinping condemned the killings and offered condolences to the victims' families.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GORANI: Now we are waiting for the results of the DNA tests for that apartment raided by police in Saint-Denis. Investigators want to know if the alleged planner of the attacks on Friday, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was one of the two people killed. Fred Pleitgen joins us.

How long before we get these results?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's a good question. It is not clear. But the authorities have said they are working as fast as possible to try to get some clarity.

The big issue that they also have is they don't really have any of Abaaoud's DNA to start with. So it is going to be quite difficult to match or to find a match to see whether or not it is actually Abaaoud. They will have to find some relatives of his, try to get some DNA and then try to find some match that way.

So that is also probably one of the reasons why we have not had any confirmation or non-confirmation yet at this point in time. The, the fact there is so much destruction in the house also makes it extremely difficult.

BERMAN: What we do know is that French officials have told us that, of the eight people arrested, Abaaoud is not one of them.

PLEITGEN: Abaaoud is not one of them and also Salah Abdeslam, the man who's being sought with an international arrest warrant worldwide, is not one of them either. That is the big question, where he is right now. That manhunt, of course, continues. He is that attacker that apparently got away from the scene, whom they are still look for.

BERMAN: In fact, we don't know who the eight people are who are in custody right now. That's a huge question.

PLEITGEN: It is a huge question. The French authorities have said they want to interrogate these people because they think they will get some information as to what the wider planning of all this could have been. Right now, all of the indications are that what happened in Paris on

Friday and what happened in Saint-Denis yesterday is very much linked. You have Abaaoud's cousin there, it certainly seems to indicate that it would be linked. But they want to know more about that.

And some of those attackers are still in the hospital and they have not been able to talk to them yet.

GORANI: So we know two people are dead and bodies still in that apartment in Saint-Denis?

PLEITGEN: I'm not sure -- I think they are not even sure if there are still body parts in that apartment in Saint-Denis. But there are definitely two people dead and they have definitely collected body parts from that area. We saw that going on yesterday, actually forensic teams were working quite a well, working well into the night. But one thing that has hampered them and that we saw as well as we were there, quite late at night, was that they were still finding unexploded ordnance from that raid --

[04:05:00]

PLEITGEN: -- because, of course, the attackers had a lot of explosives and they were still blowing things up. It was interesting to see because you were on the main street in Saint-Denis and there were people gathering everywhere at the police cordon to try and watch all this. And all of a sudden, this explosion would go on and that would still send people running. And the police said, this is us, blowing stuff up --

(CROSSTALK)

GORANI: They weren't giving you a warning ahead of time?

PLEITGEN: -- they blow a whistle and about three seconds later, there's an explosion. But not everybody hears it.

GORANI: At least you get a whistle so then people don't start panicking.

BERMAN: This was an hour-long pitched battle where they say some 5,000 rounds fired. And the force of the raid and the force of the resistance so powerful that a floor in that building essentially collapsed. They had to blow up the door when they went in, which did perhaps give the people inside some time to prepare, which is why it may have been --

PLEITGEN: That was probably one of the factors; it seems as though they definitely were prepared for the police coming in.

How else do you explain that this woman managed to put a suicide vest on, if that's what she did -- and that's what we believe that she did -- and blow herself up?

Also as far as the timeline of all this is concerned, the police said that they had one apartment under surveillance and they moved in and arrested people there. And then it looks like the suicide bomber blew herself up.

And a second apartment that they only found after the raid on the first apartment, so it was something that wasn't known to them and then they went to the second apartment and that's where that massive fight then broke out.

GORANI: Fred Pleitgen, thanks very much. We'll stay in touch with Fred as he continues to follow the latest developments from Saint- Denis and the latest developments on these Paris attacks.

BERMAN: There's another development from ISIS right now. They have made claims that they produced a homemade bomb that took down the Russian plane last month.

GORANI: CNN's Rene Marsh talked to some exclusive experts to see if this claim of that soda can could be legitimate.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RENE MARSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is the bomb ISIS claims they used to bring down the Russian passenger plane over the Sinai Peninsula. The picture posted in an ISIS propaganda magazine shows what appears to be explosive material concealed in a soda can along with wires and a detonator with an on-off switch. CNN cannot independently verify the authenticity of the photo.

The article says ISIS, quote, "discovered a way to compromise the security at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport where Metrojet departed," and a, quote, "bomb was smuggled onto the airplane."

VLADIMIR PUTIN, PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA (through translator): We will search for them everywhere, wherever they are hiding.

MARSH (voice-over): The news comes one day after Russia's president Vladimir Putin said nearly two pounds of explosive material blew the passenger plane out of the sky.

ANTHONY MAY, RETIRED ATF EXPLOSIVES ENFORCEMENT OFFICER: There is doubt as to whether or not it's the device that was used to bring down the Russian aircraft.

MARSH (voice-over): This retired ATF agent says the on-off switch on the detonator means a suicide bomber had to be in the cabin of the plane ready to flip the switch, raising questions about how someone could get on the plane with a device that could easily be detected by screening machines.

MAY: With this type of device, it has a very high metal signature, from the soda can to the battery to the switch to the wires. A completely assembled device like this would be difficult to circumvent normal security.

MARSH (voice-over): The U.S. officials have run the names on the passenger manifest list and found no red flags for anyone on board. ISIS previously claimed responsibility for the attack that killed 224 people. But if this is the bomb, it would be the first piece of evidence the group has put forward.

MAY: The soda can has some Arabic writing that puts it in the region. The detonator or blasting cap is a commercially manufactured cap that we have seen in that region.

MARSH: More skeptical bomb experts question why the explosive material wasn't shown in that picture and why ISIS didn't produce video proof of them making a bomb.

As millions of Americans prepare to travel for the holiday, they should expect longer wait times at U.S. airports as TSA spends time inspecting passengers and luggage. Also more swabbing for explosive residue. And even if you have precheck, you could also be asked to remove shoes and laptops -- CNN, Rene Marsh, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GORANI: Let's get more reaction on this from Russia. Our senior international correspondent Matthew Chance joins us now from Moscow.

What are officials and people saying in Russia about this claim, Matthew?

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: In terms of the Russian government there, acknowledging that they've viewed these images posted on that online magazine from ISIS of that tin can with a couple of other components alongside it, they have not commented on whether they believe it is the device or not, simply saying at this point, the Kremlin spokesperson, this is, saying that they get to the bottom of this and going to those responsible and bring them to justice. I'm paraphrasing these words.

[04:10:00]

CHANCE: But the emphasis over the last several hours has been on the military campaign in Syria. That is what Russian officials are talking about. They have been attacking various aspects of ISIS, infrastructure inside Syria, particularly bombing oil tankers, vehicles and trucks carrying oil to Iraq.

They say one of the main sources of revenue for the Islamic State group and Russia says that its warplanes have attacked and destroyed 500 of these tankers in past several days. They are also attacking other aspects of infrastructure.

Also in that ongoing campaign in Syria by the Russian air force, the Russians have brought into play new weapons systems, most recently long-range strategic bombers that are being used apparently to fly within the airspace of Russia but to launch cruise missiles at targets inside Syria as well. And so the Russians are really upping their military attacks inside that country.

BERMAN: All right. Matthew Chance for us in Moscow. Thank you so much, Matthew. Matthew was discussing what Russia is doing right now in Syria, really

intensifying the military effort there and, as Matthew said, the Russian defense ministry targeting some fuel convoys that appear to be headed to Iraq, black market fuel, one of the ways they finance their terror operations.

GORANI: In fact, John, the Russian defense ministry has released this video. They are much eager to publicize their actions. They've released these pictures, said to show Russian airplanes destroying 500 fuel tanks, controlled, they say, by ISIS.

BERMAN: Yes, a group monitoring the situation there says at least 33 ISIS members have been killed in the last 72 hours in airstrikes by Russia, France, the United States, the coalition. Well, Russia's not part of that coalition but in the series of airstrikes happening in that country right now, dozens of ISIS leaders and their families at this point says this group watching it, are said to be fleeing Raqqah, headed toward Iraq. And Mosul, which has been under ISIS' control now for over 18 months, the second largest city in Iraq has been under ISIS control for 18 months.

GORANI: But as Nick Paton Walsh, by the way, our senior international correspondent who is in Syria right now, underlines that it's important -- Raqqah is not only populated by ISIS operatives. There are civilians trapped in that city.

And you could imagine the terror they're feeling, not only that their city is controlled by these psychopathic terrorists but also that they're having to worry about bombing campaign. So absolute hell for some people inside that country.

Let's get the latest, though, on another angle.

BERMAN: Ian Lee for us is in Cairo.

Ian, good morning.

IAN LEE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. And just to add on what you were talking about, Hala, Raqqah is Being Slaughtered Silently has said that these civilians are incredibly fearful right now because they do have ISIS on one side and there's these airstrikes on another.

We are hearing from that group that at least seven civilians have been killed in these airstrikes. But it looks like ISIS is on the defensive, very afraid. They have controlled the flow of the Internet. They have shut down Internet cafes. They have restricted licenses to people to operate the Internet. They are afraid that people on the ground are sharing intelligence with either the Western American-led coalition or the Russians providing targets. And we've heard that some of these targets include headquarters, weapons depots, training facilities.

Although this organization has said that it hasn't hit ISIS too hard. They said they have been hit but we have not seen a large number of casualties. Right now, roughly 3 dozen ISIS fighters have been killed. But you do see as John pointed out that the family members of the leaders are fleeing to Mosul. They are moving, they're to trying to lower their profile, not moving in large convoys, not putting luggage on top of their cars. But it seems like ISIS is very afraid of what is happening and what is to come.

BERMAN: Interesting to see, Ian Lee for us in Cairo.

You get the sense, Hala, that the coalition would not bomb Mosul. Mosul and retaking Mosul has been a strategic goal of theirs for a long, long time, but very, very difficult. ISIS is very dug in there. And it's a big city with a lot of civilians.

GORANI: That's absolutely true. The interesting development though is if these ISIS operatives and their families are fleeing, what kind of strategic difference will it make for the group in terms of its operations in Syria, its ability to recruit, its ability to establish a command and control structure inside Raqqah?

(CROSSTALK)

BERMAN: Meanwhile, something that's being debated and discussed very much this morning in the United States, it's a development in Honduras, where authorities say they apprehended four or five Syrian nationals who were carrying fake passports. The men arrived in the Honduran capital where police are now holding them. They say --

[04:15:00]

BERMAN: -- the passports were stolen in Greece. At this point, there is no direct link to terrorism. There's no certainty about where they were headed. But there is this suspicion they were trying to get to the United States.

GORANI: Investigators say the Syrians flew in Tegucigalpa after traveling through five other countries. Police have not confirmed it. They say the men may, as John mentioned, may have been trying to reach the United States with those travel documents.

And coming up, the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis has been at the center of events since last Friday's terrorist attacks.

BERMAN: After the break, we will hear how area residents are coming to terms with all that has happened over the past week.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

GORANI: Welcome back to our continuing coverage of the Paris terrorist attacks as we wait for confirmation of just who was in that apartment in Saint-Denis where we're hearing more about yesterday's raids.

BERMAN: Some witnesses have been talking to CNN about what they saw as these dramatic events unfolded. Some 5,000 rounds fired there, to give you a sense of what it must have been like. And some people who were there told Anderson Cooper about the experience.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEFFY, RAID WITNESS: Actually --

[04:20:00]

STEFFY: -- we were not realizing that it was the assault. Actually I was thinking it was a terrorist attack.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: You thought it was actually an attack by terrorists?

AXEL, RAID WITNESS: I thought they were going in house to kill people. I was really shaking and I took 30 minutes to understand that it was an assault from policemen.

COOPER: You finally were able to actually see the police?

AXEL: Yes.

STEFFY: We called them.

COOPER: You called the police?

STEFFY: We called the police and she didn't know what was happening on the phone. So I took the phone to make her hear the shotgun. And she was, OK, OK. I hear them. She took some information then she came back to us and saying that, stay inside, don't move. Close the window and everything.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GORANI: Well, Saint-Denis is home to the Stade de France, the stadium where three suicide bombers struck last Friday. It's a Paris suburb, it's very diverse. But it also has a history of strikes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GORANI (voice-over): This was the sound residents of Saint-Denis found themselves waking up to on Wednesday. Gunfire and explosions ringing out before dawn as police carried out raids searching for suspects behind Friday's terrorist attacks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): I was woken up by a deafening noise. Gunshots, boom, boom, boom. It woke me up. I jumped out of bed. I opened the window. I stuck my head outside. I wanted to watch. The police told me, close the window, sir. Close it now.

GORANI (voice-over): But for the neighborhood, this has become an increasingly familiar scene.

Stade de France was the first target of Friday's attacks that left 129 victims dead. Just under six miles from Paris, Saint-Denis is the main town of the multiethnic Saint-Saint-Denis apartment centered around the Basilica de Saint-Denis, the burial place for many French kings, this is now an area with a high proportion of immigrants; 28 percent of the population in 2012 were immigrants, according to the French National Institute for Statistics.

The overall unemployment is higher than 13 percent and it has a relatively high crime rate.

It was in 2005 that riots broke out near Saint-Denis in Clichy-sous- Bois, with violence spreading quickly to the rest of the department. The unrest lasted four weeks as French youth were protesting against their living and economic conditions and against discrimination.

A decade later, violence strikes again in a different and more horrific form. And the wounds for this suburb have reopened.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GORANI: Well, as the people of France continue dealing with these attacks from Friday, the French government is vowing revenge against ISIS.

BERMAN: They are talking about going after the people who planned these attacks. We are joined by Melissa Bell, international affairs editor with France 24.

Melissa, it's interesting. The French police told us yesterday right after these raids they believe they got there just in time, just in time to stop what could have been another attack that was minutes or hours away.

Do you get the sense from the sources you're talking to now that they feel like they are a step ahead of what ISIS might be doing here?

MELISSA BELL, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS EDITOR, FRANCE 24: This is what the French public is extremely worried about. Clearly the failures of French security over the course of the last few days have been fairly spectacular.

Yes, they moved in on this particular target. We don't yet know whether the man they were actually looking for, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, is amongst them. We should find out in the coming hour whether he was among the two who were killed.

But they got there and prevented what might have been an attack on La Defense. That's what some of the speculation is, the sort of business district just outside of Paris.

But when you consider what actually went on here last Friday and the people who were involved, some of whom who were French citizens who were actually under surveillance, who had gone to Syria, who had managed to come back, the failures are quite spectacular.

You are talking about a country that, over the course of last month, has already changed legislation to keep a better eye on people. The surveillance was in particular substantially tightened in order that this thing couldn't happen. And still these people got through the nets. Still these people

managed to go to Syria and come back, slipping under the radar, which seems extraordinary. So there are all kinds of worries in France now about what our security services and what our surveillance forces, what our intelligence is capable of and where it has failed.

BERMAN: It is interesting because we don't know if Abdelhamid Abaaoud was inside that apartment there, testing body parts right now to see if they can match the DNA to him.

But if it was him, that would be extraordinary. This man who they believed to have been the ringleader in previous attacks, in the train attack that was headed to Paris --

[04:25:00]

BERMAN: -- in Verviers and the killings or the attempted killings of police there. They had their eye on this guy and if he can come to and from Syria, that doesn't speak well of what's going on.

BELL: Precisely. And he'd already boasted about it. You'll remember that a few months ago he spoke out in an Islamist publication, boasting the fact that, in 2014, he had slipped back in Europe in order to help plan some of these attacks, including the one on Verviers that was foiled in the end that you mentioned.

If he was back in Paris at the time of these attacks, it suggests that, with a remarkable kind of courage, go to and from France and Europe, knowing that they can slip through the radar even when there are international arrest warrants out for them and even when they're being officially watched by European governments.

You can take the case of one of the French citizens who died in the Bataclan massacre on Friday, Ismael Omar Mostefai, Paris was warned twice by Ankara over the course of the last year about this guy. Neither time did Paris respond or bother to find out anymore. It's the number of lapses over the course of the last few days that's extraordinary.

GORANI: And also part of the problem has to be manpower, personnel; in order to conduct surveillance on all these people at the same time, you are talking about tens of thousands of people required. France and Belgium and other European countries don't have those types of numbers to keep track of all these people.

BELL: This is one of the points that's being made a great deal at the moment. Even now, French parliamentarians have gathered to look at not just this extension of the state of emergency but also this constitutional reform that Francois Hollande was saying . There are people saying, well, in the last three years, there have been four separate changes to legislation.

So when it comes to tightening the laws, they have been terribly good. Where they have failed is putting in the numbers. So after the January attack, he announced that there wouldn't be the reductions that had been planned. What is needed is huge amounts of extra staff, particularly in intelligence services. I think that is one of the things that you will hear more about in the coming days.

BERMAN: And you have spoken of what is called failures leading up to what happened on Friday. Obviously some success in going into that apartment and those apartments yesterday in Saint-Denis.

Do you have a sense how many more people might be operating or how many more people the authorities believe might be operating directly connected to the cells?

BELL: We can only speculate. This is one of big questions. In this sense of uncertainty, which is almost palpable all around now, the people. And you're right. It does count as a success on the part of French services, who probably did manage to foil an attack and in any case, we know for a fact stopped a bunch of people who were extremely heavily armed and undoubtedly up to no good.

But the idea that that raid happened under our noses, it added itself to all the violence on Friday. It just adds that sense of complete insecurity. With all those questions about what we actually know about what these people that are being watched. We are talking about ones that are known and that are watched and that are under judicial control but have still managed to slip through the net.

What about the others?

So of course all of these questions add to that feeling that anything can happen at anytime. And it is troubling.

BERMAN: They were literally in the shadow of the Stade de France, where the suicide attacks happened on Friday, days after they were there.

GORANI: A little more than a mile away. At first we thought eight. Now we know at least eight others. Two dead, several under arrest.

Thanks very much, Melissa Bell. We appreciate your take and your analysis.

Here in Paris, people are pulling together after the attacks. However, the political climate is shifting to the Right. One woman is leading that move. Ahead, I speak to Marine Le Pen, the president of the National Front.

BERMAN: We are continuing to monitor the discussions underway right now and the debates underway right now in the French parliament as they discuss what to do, whether to extend this extraordinary state of emergency even longer. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)