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PARIS (AP) —
French police are hunting for a second fugitive directly involved in the deadly Paris attacks, officials said Tuesday after France made an unprecedented demand that its European Union allies support its military action against the Islamic State group.
The disclosure of a second possible fugitive came as France launched new airstrikes on the militants' stronghold in Syria; as Vladimir Putin ordered a Russian military cruiser to work with France on fighting IS in Syria and as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hinted at a possible Syrian cease-fire so the world could focus on crushing IS.
French and Belgian police were already looking for key suspect Salah Abdeslam, 26, whose suicide-bomber brother Brahim died in the attacks Friday night that killed at least 129 people and left over 350 wounded in Paris. Islamic state militants have claimed responsibility for the carnage.
Seven attackers died that night — three around the national stadium, three inside the Bataclan concert hall, and one at a restaurant nearby. A team of gunmen also opened fire at nightspots in one of Paris' trendiest neighborhoods.
However, three French officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday that an analysis of the attacks showed that one person directly involved in them was unaccounted for. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to provide details about the ongoing investigation, said the second fugitive has not been identified.
The Paris attacks have galvanized international determination to confront the militants.
The French government invoked a never-before-used article of the EU's Lisbon Treaty obliging members of the 28-nation bloc to give "aid and assistance by all the means in their power" to a member country that is "the victim of armed aggression on its territory."
French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said all 27 of France's EU partners responded positively.
"Every country said: I am going to assist, I am going to help," Drian said.
Arriving for talks in Brussels, Greek Defense Minister Panagiotis Kammenos told reporters that the Paris attacks were a game-changer for the bloc. "This is Sept. 11 for Europe," he said.
Paris police said 16 people had been arrested in the region in relation to the deadly attacks, and police have carried out 104 raids since a state of emergency was declared Saturday.
French military spokesman Col. Gilles Jaron said the latest airstrikes in the Islamic State group's de-facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa destroyed a command post and training camp. NATO allies were sharing intelligence and working closely with France, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said.
In Moscow, Putin ordered the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, currently in the Mediterranean, to start cooperating with the French military on operations in Syria. His order came as Russia's defense minister said its warplanes fired cruise missiles on militant positions in Syria's Idlib and Aleppo provinces. IS has positions in Aleppo province, while the Nusra militant group is in Idlib.
Moscow has vowed to hunt down those responsible for blowing up a Russian passenger plane over Egypt last month, killing 224 people, mostly Russian tourists. IS has also claimed responsibility for that Oct. 31 attack.
Seven of the Paris attackers died Friday — six after detonating suicide belts and a seventh from police gunfire — but Iraqi intelligence officials told The Associated Press their sources indicated 19 people had participated in the Paris attacks and five others had provided hands-on logistical support.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve conceded that "the majority of those who were involved in this attack were unknown to our services."
Mohamed Abdeslam, another brother of fugitive Salah Abdeslam, on Tuesday urged his brother to turn himself in. Mohamed, who was arrested and questioned following the attack but released Monday, told French TV BFM that his brother was devout but showed no signs of being a radical Islamist. He said Salah prayed and attended a mosque occasionally, but also dressed in jeans and pullovers.
Two men arrested in Belgium, meanwhile, admitted driving to France to pick up Salah Abdeslam early Saturday, their lawyers said.
Mohammed Amri, 27, denies any involvement in the Paris attacks and says he went to Paris to collect his friend Salah, according to his defense lawyer Xavier Carrette. Hamza Attou, 21, says he went along to keep Amri company, his lawyer Carine Couquelet said. Both are being held on charges of terrorist murder and conspiracy.
Belgian media reported that Amri and Attou were being investigated as potential suppliers of the suicide bombs used in the attacks, since ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be used to make explosives, was discovered in a search of their residence.
Their defense lawyers said they could not confirm those reports.
Salah and Brahim Abdeslam booked a hotel in the southeastern Paris suburb of Alfortville and rented a house in the northeastern suburb of Bobigny several days before the attacks, a French judicial official told The Associated Press. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak about the ongoing investigation.
Austria's Interior Ministry said Salah Abdeslam, the suspected driver of one group of gunmen carrying out attacks on Paris, entered the country about two months ago with two unidentified companions. After the attacks, Salah Abdeslam slipped through France's fingers, with French police accidentally permitting him to cross into Belgium on Saturday.
Kerry flew to France as a gesture of solidarity and met Hollande and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Tuesday.
Standing next to Hollande at the Elysee Palace, Kerry said the carnage in the French capital, along with recent attacks in Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey, made it clear that more pressure must be brought to bear on Islamic State extremists.
A cease-fire between Syria's government and the opposition could be just weeks away, Kerry said, describing it as potentially a "gigantic step" toward deeper international cooperation against IS.
A French security official, meanwhile, said anti-terror intelligence officials had identified Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, as the chief architect of the Paris attacks.
The official cited chatter from IS figures that Abaaoud had recommended a concert as an ideal target for inflicting maximum casualties, as well as electronic communications between Abaaoud and one of the Paris attackers who blew himself up. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive investigation.
It was not exactly clear where Abaaoud is.
In other developments Tuesday:
— In a show of solidarity, British Prime Minister David Cameron was joining Prince William at a soccer match Tuesday night between England and France in London's Wembley Stadium. Armed police were patrolling the site.
— Another Belgian car with a shattered front passenger window was found in northern Paris — the third vehicle police identified as having links to the attacks.
— The Eiffel Tower shut down again after opening for just a day Monday, and heavily armed troops patrolled the courtyard of the Louvre Museum.
— Germany's top security official said a Syrian passport found with one of the Paris attackers may have been planted to make Europeans fearful of refugees. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin it was "unusual that such a person was faithfully registered in Greece, Serbia and Croatia" amid the chaos of Europe's immigration crisis. He said the multiple passport registrations could be "a trail that was intentionally laid."
— German police arrested seven people near the western city of Aachen, but later released them, saying no links to the Paris attacks were found.
NEW YORK (AP) —
A volunteer firefighter badly burned in a 2001 blaze has received the most extensive face transplant ever, covering his skull and much of his neck, a New York hospital announced Monday.
The surgery took place in August at the NYU Langone Medical Center. The patient, 41-year-old Patrick Hardison, is still undergoing physical therapy at the hospital but plans to return home to Senatobia, Mississippi, in time for Thanksgiving.
The surgery has paved the way for him to regain normal vision, and in an interview last week he said that will let him accomplish a major goal: "I'll start driving again."
More than two dozen face transplants have been performed worldwide since the first one in France in 2005. Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, who led the surgical team that did Hardison's transplant and recently wrote a review of the field, said Hardison's is by far the most extensive performed successfully in terms of the amount of tissue transferred.
The transplant extends from the top of the head, over Hardison's skull and down to the collarbones in front; in back, it reaches far enough down that only a tiny patch of Hardison's original hair remains — its color matched by the dark blond hair growing on his new scalp. The transplant includes both ears.
It's "a historic achievement," said Dr. Amir Dorafshar, co-director of the face transplant program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the operation. "This type of treatment option will potentially revolutionize the care of patients with severe facial burn injuries."
The surgery began Aug. 14 and lasted 26 hours. It left no scars on Hardison's new face because the seam of the transplanted tissue runs down the back of his skull.
The donor was 26-year-old New York artist and competitive bicyclist David P. Rodebaugh. He had died of injuries from a biking accident on a Brooklyn street.
Hardison was burned Sept. 5, 2001, in Senatobia in northwestern Mississippi. A 27-year-old father of three at the time who'd served for seven years as a volunteer firefighter, he entered a burning house to search for a woman. The roof collapsed, giving him third-degree burns on his head, neck and upper torso.
He spent about two months at a Memphis, Tennessee, burn center. Doctors used a layer of skin from his legs to cover his wounded head, but he had lost his ears, lips, most of his nose and virtually all of his eyelid tissue.
Since he could not blink, doctors used skin grafts to reinforce what remained of his eyelids and sewed them nearly shut to protect his eyes. That left him with only pinhole vision.
"I was almost totally blind," he recalled. "I could see just a little bit."
His face was "one huge scar," Rodriguez said. Hardison still went to baseball games and did other things outside, although people stared. He playfully told curious children that he had fought a bear. Still, he said, life was hard. He endured 71 surgeries.
Eventually a church friend of his wrote to Rodriguez, who had performed a 2012 face transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The doctor said he would try to help, and in August 2014 Hardison was placed on a waiting list.
"We were looking for the ideal donor," one who matched Hardison on biological traits to minimize the risk of his body's rejecting the new tissue, as well as things like skin and hair color, said Rodriguez, who by then had moved to NYU Langone.
A year later, Rodebaugh was identified as a potential donor by LiveOnNY, the nonprofit organization that seeks transplant organs and tissue in the New York City area. A native of the Columbus, Ohio, area, he had signed up to donate organs. His mother gave permission to use his face, noting that Rodebaugh had always wanted to be a firefighter, said LiveOnNY president Helen Irving.
The hospital paid for the transplant operation, which included attaching four bone segments to Hardison's skull, as anchors to prevent the face from drooping.
Now, three months later, the lower part of his face remains swollen, but Rodriguez said that will go away in a few months. With his new eyelids and more surgery, he's expected to regain a normal field of vision for the first time in more than a decade. He will have to continuing taking medications to prevent his body from rejecting the transplant.
Eventually, "a casual observer will not notice anything that is odd" in Hardison's new face, which will blend features of his original face and the donor's, Rodriguez said.
Hardison said his new face has already made a difference when he goes outside.
"I used to get stared at all the time, but now I'm just an average guy," he said.
He's been told he can't return to firefighting because of insurance concerns, but he has another plan: motivational speaking or something similar, perhaps for wounded veterans.
His message? "Just how there is hope."
DETROIT (AP) —
Governors across the U.S. have threatened to stop accepting Syrian refugees following last week's attacks in Paris, even as experts counter they lack legal authority to block the relocations.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama, whose administration recently pledged to accept about 10,000 Syrian refugees, argued Monday that the United States needs to allow them because many are fleeing terrorism.
Some state leaders disagree with Obama's assertion the country can simultaneously welcome refugees seeking safety and ensure citizens' security. Several have called for a complete halt to resettlement, others for temporary delays and a few seek more information from federal officials on the vetting process.
The Homeland Security Department says refugees face the highest level of security screening of anybody entering the U.S., but officials will work to allay states' concerns.
Here's a look at why some states are balking, what federal officials and refugee experts are saying and how the refugee resettlement process works.
WHAT ARE THE STATES' PRIMARY CONCERNS AND WHAT ARE THEY CALLING FOR?
Governors in many states, mainly Republicans, are responding to heightened concerns terrorists might use the refugees as cover to sneak across borders. Authorities said a Syrian passport was found near one of the attackers in Friday's deadly attacks, and the Paris prosecutors' office says fingerprints from the attacker match those of someone who passed through Greece in October.
The governors of several states are calling for the temporary suspension of accepting new refugees. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered Texas' refugee resettlement program not to accept any more Syrians and in a letter to Obama, the Republican also urged scrapping federal plans to accept more Syrian refugees into the country as a whole. He said the federal government can't perform "proper security checks" on Syrians.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey called for an immediate halt and wrote he was "invoking our state's right ... to receive immediate consultation by federal authorities" to address the state's concerns. Iowa GOP Gov. Terry Branstad acknowledged governors might lack authority but added he wants more information about refugee placement and the vetting process.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, called the governors' comments and recommendations "un-American," adding that rejecting refugees projects "our fears to the world."
WHAT DO REFUGEE EXPERTS SAY?
Lavinia Limon, president and CEO of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigration, said under the Refugee Act of 1980 governors cannot legally block refugees. Each state has a refugee coordinator, a post created as part of that law, she said. Funded by the federal government, the post coordinates resettlement efforts with agencies such as hers and directs federal funds for refugees.
Westy Egmont, director of Boston College's Immigrant Integration Lab, said the law previously withstood state challenges partly because the federal government has worked to equally distribute refugees being resettled. Some states have worked with resettlement agencies to limit new refugee arrivals to those with family ties to the community while families or individuals with no ties to a specific state have been sent to other locations with better prospects for jobs, housing and integration programs.
WHAT EXACTLY HAS OBAMA PROPOSED AND HOW DOES THE REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT PROGRAM WORK?
The Obama administration has pledged to accept about 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next 12 months. The State Department said the refugees would be spread nationwide, though many go on to places where they have family or cultural connections, such as Detroit, New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.
According to government statistics, the U.S. has taken about 2,150 Syrians since Oct. 1, 2011 — most in the last year.
Obama said Monday the U.S. needs to continue to accept refugees from Syria because many are fleeing terrorism: "Our nations can welcome refugees who are desperately seeking safety and ensure our own security. We can and must do both."
Refugees are generally invited to move to the United States after being referred to a State Department Resettlement Support Center by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In some cases they can be referred by a U.S. embassy or non-governmental agency.
In other cases, potential refugees who are close relatives of people granted asylum in the U.S. or other refugees already in the country can apply directly with the U.S. government. The average wait time for a refugee to be cleared to enter the U.S. is about two years, but often longer for people from Syria and elsewhere.
The Homeland Security Department said refugees being accepted into the United States are subject to the highest level of security screening of anyone coming to the U.S. It added officials will continue to consult with states to allay concerns they have about security.
HOW ARE LAWMAKERS AND PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES REACTING?
Republican members of Congress called for suspending the Syrian refugee program and threatened to try to stop it. New House Speaker Paul Ryan neither endorsed nor rejected that course.
Many GOP candidates, already skeptical if not hostile to welcoming refugees, came out even stronger. Donald Trump said the U.S. should increase surveillance of mosques, consider closing any tied to radicals and be prepared to suspend some civil liberties.
Ben Carson said, "Until we can sort out the bad guys, we must not be foolish," and of Syrians already in the U.S., he added: "I would watch them very carefully."
Calls by GOP rivals Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush to give preference to Christian refugees prompted a sharp rebuke from Obama.