PARIS — Brussels is emerging as a focus of the investigation of Friday’s terror attacks in Paris, with prosecutors saying two of the assailants were French citizens who lived in Belgium.

French investigators are in Brussels to follow leads in the assaults that killed at least 129 people, Belgium’s Federal Prosecutors’ Office said in a statement. Two rental cars registered in Belgium were used in the attacks, the prosecutors said, and seven people have been detained in the country on suspicion of being involved.

Police in France believe at least one person who participated directly may still be on the run, a French government official said. The total number of people who carried out and provided support for the assaults in more than half a dozen locations is still unclear, the official added, asking not to be identified in line with government policy. Seven attackers died on Friday.

Security agencies across Europe are racing to piece together how teams of coordinated gunmen and suicide bombers could strike in the heart of one of Europe’s most heavily policed cities, evading a security apparatus that had been strengthened after January’s Charlie Hebdo rampage. French President Francois Hollande called the violence “an act of war” by the Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility and threatened similar actions in the future.

Investigators on Saturday night found a car containing Kalashnikov rifles abandoned in Montreuil, just outside Paris, which matched descriptions of a vehicle used in the assault. One of the attackers – identified by a severed finger at the Bataclan concert hall where 89 people were killed – was 29- year-old Omar Ismail Mostefai, a French citizen from a Paris suburb, police said. Seven of his family members were arrested in France.

The Belgian connection may worsen security officials’ fears that the country has become a hub for Islamic extremism. The nation of about 11 million has the highest per-capita number of citizens fighting in Syria or Iraq of any western European state, the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalisation said earlier this year.

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Meanwhile, concerns over the radicalization of members of France’s Muslim population, Europe’s largest, will intensify if French citizens are confirmed to have played a major role in Friday’s events. All three attackers in the Charlie Hebdo assaults in Paris, which killed 17, were French-born.

Police and intelligence agencies are also trying to determine if any of the assailants entered Europe as asylum seekers from the Middle East. Serbia’s Interior Ministry on Sunday said one of the suspects, carrying a Syrian passport, had formally requested refuge in the country on Oct. 7 after passing through Greece four days earlier. Belgrade-based Blic newspaper reported the man was a 25-year-old named Ahmad Almohammad.

The assaults may have significant implications for European policies toward the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the war in Syria. Right-wing politicians in many European countries have argued that the relatively generous approach advocated by German chancellor Angela Merkel and others could open the door to jihadists.

To assist in preventing future incidents, the leaders of the G-20 group of major economies will likely announce stepped- up efforts Sunday to cut off financing for terror groups and disrupt recruitment operations, according to two officials familiar with a draft communique. Hollande has skipped their summit in Turkey to focus on France’s anti-terror efforts.

“Air strikes will probably intensify in the coming weeks” as France and its allies work to damage Islamic State’s bases in Iraq and Syria, Teneo Intelligence, a political risk consultancy, wrote in a note to clients. However, “a large-scale operation with boots on the ground will probably remain off the table,” it said.

France is currently the only European power conducting major combat operations over both Middle Eastern countries. Islamic State said the Paris attacks were retaliation for France’s extended military involvement in the region.

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Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said three distinct groups of attackers were operating in and around the French capital on Friday night: a trio of suicide bombers at the Stade de France stadium, gunmen who killed 89 at Bataclan, and a third group who drove between nearby bars and restaurants, riddling them with bullets.

As a new week approaches, Parisians are trying to recover from their city’s worst-ever terror attack, in which more than 300 were injured in addition to a death toll that was the largest in Europe since the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

Citizens set up impromptu memorials at locations that were struck, which were clustered in the multicultural 10th and 11th arrondissements. At the Place de le Republique, a short walk from Bataclan, hundreds lit candles and left notes and signs that read “we weep but never fear” and “books not bombs.”

Late Sunday afternoon, groups of people affected by the attacks came and went at the Ecole Militaire, a military academy where the government is providing support services. Families and friends consoled each other as they left the sandstone building, which lies in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower – whose iconic lights have been switched off in homage to the victims.


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