CCTV footage emerged yesterday (Friday) of the "ringleader" behind the Paris attacks jumping a ticket barrier in the city's Metro system as fellow jihadists were committing mass murder across the French capital.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud dodged a fare at the Croix de Chavaux station in the suburb of Montreuil, 200 yards from where one of the cars used in the attacks was found.
The footage showed him at the station at 10.14pm, when the attack on the Bataclan concert hall was still under way, suggesting he played a more active role in the atrocities than previously thought. A Seat car was found abandoned near the same Metro station at the weekend with three Kalashnikov assault rifles inside.
Officials will now trace Abaaoud's movements on Line 9 and seek further evidence of fellow conspirators. He was later killed in a firefight when police raided an apartment in the Saint Denis district, where he was hiding with Hasna Aitboulahcen, his cousin, and other suspects.
European security authorities had believed he was in Syria.
In Morocco, a security source yesterday disclosed that they had arrested Abaaoud's younger brother Yassine as his plane landed last month in the city of Agadir, his father's home. He has been in custody since, the source said.
Abaaoud, 28, was known to police as a petty criminal who went to fight in Syria in 2013. He is believed to have recruited young men from immigrant families in the Molenbeek district of Brussels, where he grew up, and elsewhere in Belgium and France.
His mangled body was identified on Thursday. A handbag in the debris of the apartment contained a passport in the name of Aitboulahcen. She blew herself up during the siege, becoming Europe's first female suicide bomber.
Even before last week's attacks Abaaoud was one of Isil's highest-profile European recruits, appearing in its online English-language magazine, where he boasted of crossing European borders to stage attacks.
He claimed to have escaped a continent-wide manhunt after a police raid in Belgium in 2013 in which two other militants were killed.
His own family had disowned him, accusing him of abducting his 13-year-old brother, Younes, who was later promoted on the internet as Isil's youngest foreign fighter in Syria.