Hasna Aitboulahcen did not blow herself up in Paris raid: police

Hasna Aitboulahcen, the woman found dead after a ferocious police assault on an apartment building targeting the suspected  ringleader of the Paris attacks, did not die in a suicide bombing, a police source said Friday.

Prosecutors said on the day of Wednesday's raid in Saint-Denis in the north of the capital that a woman had detonated an explosives vest and died.

The police source said that the suicide bomber was in fact a man, not a woman.

According to a report in Daily Mail, Police officers described how Aitboulahcen had called out to them shortly before the explosion, crying: 'Help me, help me.'

Armed officers reportedly believed she had called out to lure them into a trap.

Asked to explain the misidentification, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said: 'All I can tell you is that the kamikaze [suicide bomber] was not Hasna.'

Colleagues of Mr Molins said 'more human parts', a handbag and Aitboulahcen's French passport were also found in the rubble of the Saint Denis apartment block.