France tracked down Paris attack ringleader through carelessly discarded cellphone

After the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, French officials quickly fingered Abdelhamid Abaaoud, 28, as the ringleader, but they believed the Belgian-Moroccan Islamic State commander was in Syria. Then on Monday, France got a tip from a "non-European country" that he had slipped into Europe through Greece, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Thursday. French police tracked Abaaoud down to an apartment in Saint-Denis, a 15-minute walk from one of the attack sites, and he was killed in a violent raid Wednesday morning.

The big break that led police to Saint-Denis and Abaaoud was what The Washington Post calls "a diamond in the trash," a cellphone that one of the attackers had thrown in a wastebasket outside the Bataclan concert hall before he and two fellow terrorists went in and killed 89 people. The phone contained a text message sent to somebody French officials believe was Abaaoud about the time the attack started, saying: "It's on. We're starting." The phone's geolocation services also led to one of the attacker's hideouts in Paris, The New York Times reports, and according to The Associated Press, it had contact information for Hasna Aitboulahcen, a woman linked to Abaaoud who blew herself up in Wednesday morning's raid.

France wiretapped Aitboulahcen's phone, and while she did not speak to Abaaoud, she did get a call telling her that her "cousin" was coming. ("Police do not believe that Abaaoud was in fact related to Aitboulahcen," The Washington Post says, "but the police source said that the caller referred to him that way.") Moroccan authorities also reportedly helped lead police to the apartment.

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It's not clear how Abaaoud died — caught in Aitboulahcen's suicide blast, shot by a French police sniper — but his death is a big deal for Europe's anti-terrorism effort. Abaaoud had risen from menial recruit to an "emir of war" after joining ISIS in early 2014. Entrusted with setting up terrorism cells in Europe, he was humiliated when Belgian police foiled his first attempted assault and killed two comrades in Verviers, and Cazeneuve said Abaaoud was involved in four more failed terrorism plots in Europe since the spring, including the assault on a high-speed train stopped by American tourists. With Abaaoud dead, Europe now has to figure out how to mend the gaping holes he exposed in its immigration and intelligence operations.