Abdelhamid Abaaoud: Greek police 'failed to catch' Paris attacks mastermind months before massacre

The Isis militant was reportedly tracked in Athens as he directed another foiled attack

Abdelhamid Abaaoud boasted of his escape from authorities in Belgium following a failed terrorist attack in an interview published in Isis' propaganda magazine in February (Dabiq)

Police failed to capture the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks during an operation in Greece in January, it has been claimed.

An anonymous Belgian anti-terror official told the BBC Abdelhamid Abaaoud was traced to Athens, where he was allegedly directing an extremist cell in Belgium using a mobile phone.

The signal may have been tracked to city square but the Isis militant was not found, the BBC reported.

At the same time, Belgian authorities were closing in on a group of men in Verviers who were planning to behead police officers in an imminent terror attack just days after the Charlie Hebdo massacres.

Two suspected jihadists, believed to be Abaaoud’s accomplices, were killed by police in a gunfight on 15 January but their director was not there.

Greek police raided two flats in Athens on 17 January, where they found traces of DNA matched to Abaaoud.

He died in a police raid on a flat in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, alongside his cousin and a suspected suicide bomber on 18 November.

Abaaoud, a 27-year-old Belgian national of Moroccan descent, had linked to at least four foiled terror attacks before the massacres in Paris and boasted in an Isis propaganda magazine of how he evaded European security services to travel to and from the group’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.