As French police encircled the hide-out of the alleged Paris attackers, a young woman appeared at the window of the third-storey apartment with her hands raised in the air.
The woman had long, blonde hair, according to one witness, and had been heard pleading for help from inside the apartment, which was the focus of a furious gun battle in the early hours of Wednesday morning, local time.
"Help, help, help me!" the woman yelled out to police from inside the apartment in Saint-Denis, a witness, Christian, told Le Parisien newspaper.
Christian said the heavily armed officers asked the woman to identify herself, prompting her to come to the window and raise her hands just after 6am.
The police shouted twice: "Where's your friend?"
Each time she desperately replied: "He's not my friend!"
Seconds later, amid reports of sniper fire, an almighty explosion tore through the apartment block, sending debris - including human remains - on to the street.
"I think that's when she activated her bomb. It was big," another witness told Libération.
"Many of the windows in the road shattered."
Police now believe the female suicide bomber was 26-year-old Hasna Aitboulahcen, the cousin of the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, according to Le Parisien.
She had been under surveillance since Tuesday, according to reports, and had been sheltering alongside Abaaoud and a group of men in the apartment building north of Paris.
Aitboulahcen was born in 1989 in France and was a French-Moroccan citizen, according to reports.
She was said to have grown up in the Paris region and managed a construction company, Beko Construction, in the northern Paris suburb of Epinay-sur-Seine until 2012.
In detonating her explosives vest, she became the first female suicide bomber in western Europe, The Guardian reported.
The witness, Christian, told Le Parisien that the suicide bomber showed her hands, but kept her face obscured.
She also withdrew her hands several times, before putting them up again. Police believed she may have been making a phone call, Le Parisien said.
"They shouted at her: 'Keep your hands in the air!' They told her: 'We're going to shoot,' " Christian told the newspaper.
"The shooting resumed. The police were firing from the roof of the building opposite. Suddenly there was an enormous explosion. It was probably the woman who blew herself up. The windows shattered. Lots of objects from the apartment were thrown into the street, pieces of human flesh as well. They are still there. You can see a bit of the head, of skin, of ribs ... "
