into contact. there have been very agressive stop and search operations going on all over paris and the area. i think people are mostly staying home. i understand it. okay, ben plesser, nbc news producer traveling with richard engel, we appreciate you joining us. continue to do great work for us. we appreciate it. thanks. all right. we continue to follow this developing news here on msnbc as it unfolds in saint-denis, paris. stay with us with our continuing coverage.
carrying out these raids. again, two people killed in the raids. one, a female suicide bomber who exploded a belt that she was wearing and the identity of the other person is unknown at this point. we re waiting for the developing news here to find out whether or not abdelhamid abaaoud was, in fact, inside that apartment building. that would be a massive get for them, of course, if he was because they do believe he coordinated these attacks which went down on friday, killing 129 people. i believe we have ben back now at this point. ben, are you with me? i am. apologies. no worries at all. take us through early this morning that incredible gunfire. yes, we pulled into town. we drove in from paris in a hurry when we heard about the raid. when we arrived, there was still pretty heavy gunfire echoing off the buildings in this neighborhood. the police, by that point, had established a pretty wide cordon around the area they were operating in, and they were very
fundamentalist approaches to islam. and it was in that group, there s obviously a tiny minority, but this is a minority that many people know about. and yes, the witnesses we spoke to were not they were terrified. they were not expecting to find themselves waking up to a war zone outside their door this morning. but they weren t totally surprised by the ties between this neighborhood and back in paris. the pictures that we re looking at right now, ben, are quite calm, i imagine, to what you all saw. i understand that you have some video that you and your team shot a little earlier that was a little more intense. yeah, this was we were just standing, watching the operations seemingly wind down. the cops relaxed in their posture a little bit. and then all of a sudden out of the blue, these four police officers in full riot gear, guns
designed for two reasons. one was to stop would-be assistants from warning the targets of the movements of the police. so they kept everyone well away so that they wouldn t have a vantage point and be able to see and call in, the police are coming and this is the direction they re coming from. but i think the other reason is probably that they wanted to make sure that right now we would be far away enough that we would not violate the rules in terms of this investigation and that the media, the people, the neighbors, would not glean any useful information about what the police is doing, where the investigation is headed from the forensic evidence that they re getting. i wonder, ben i know you mentioned that richard engel was speaking in arabic to some of the people that live in the area there because that is a predominant language. i wonder if any of them mentioned that some of the authorities were trying to get