AUSTRALIA was among a -coalition of security agencies hunting the ringleader of the Paris attacks in the months before he struck.
Authorities believe Abdelhamid Abaaoud, 27, left, may have been killed in a French police raid in Saint Denis after he co-ordinated the attacks that slaughtered 129 people. 
Police launched a seven-hour assault in the north of Paris on Wednesday after intelligence led investigators to an apartment where the Belgian suspected of orchestrating the worst-ever militant attack on French soil was thought to be hiding.
A female suicide bomber and a man shot by police both died. French forensic experts are continuing to try to establish whether Abaaoud was the man killed in the police raid. Abaaoud had been on the run since dodging capture over a failed terror plot in Belgium in   January. He had taunted authorities with his ability to get in and out of Syria undetected.
The US was hunting him with drones and was passing on information about him as part of its "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing operation with Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
France is not a part of the Five Eyes group but had deployed drones of its own to track Abaaoud. It was also sharing information.
There is a suggestion that at one point, a phone call from northern Syria to Europe was intercepted. But Abaaoud may have been spared being hit by a drone strike because of the risk of killing his 13-year-old brother, who he had recruited.
In   September President Francois Hollande said French drones had been sent in because "we have proof that attacks have been planned from Syria against several countries, notably France".
It has also been revealed that US intelligence warned in   May that Islamic State had developed the capability to carry out the kind of attack seen in Paris and explicitly picked out the alleged mastermind.An assessment published by the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, in co-ordination with the FBI, makes reference to Abaaoud and contains pictures of him. The US intelligence report focuses on the lesson learned from a plot disrupted by -Belgian authorities in   January in several cities and called it "the first instance in which a large group of terrorists possibly operating under ISIL -direction has been discovered". â€ƒIt added that the plot "may -indicate that the group has -developed the capability to launch more complex operations in the West", as opposed to so-called "lone wolf" attacks or assaults by smaller or less sophisticated groups.