A 23-year-old Frenchmen has been identified as one of the gunmen killed in the attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris.
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Mohamed-Aggad arrived in Syria around the same time as the other two Bataclan attackers, also French citizens, and the arrival of now-deceased Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected planner of the attack.
“Every time, I was expecting what someone would tell me he died in a bombing…I would have preferred that he died there, rather than here”, said the attacker’s father, Said Mohamed-Aggad, as quoted by Le Parisien.
“I can’t believe it was him”, said Yazar Mesut, a 46-year-old neighbour, speaking in one of the town’s bars.
The other attackers involved in the massacre of 90 concert-goers at the Bataclan – Omar Ismail Mostefai, 29, and former Paris bus driver Samy Amimour, 28 – had also been to Syria.
After she gave French police a DNA sample, they found that one of her sons had died in the concert venue.
CNN reports authorities in Paris knew Aggad’s identity as early as two weeks ago but withheld the information because of the ongoing investigation into the attacks.Aggad’s name was released after police reportedly raided his mother’s home Wednesday night in a suburb of Strasbourg.
Together with his brother Karim and a group of about a dozen men Foued travelled to Syria at the end of 2013, according to police sources.
Most of the group of six men from Strasbourg who went to Syria with Aggad were arrested in the Meinau area of the city in May past year after their return and are all in custody on terrorist charges.
Mohamed-Aggad’s mother received a text message in English about 10 days ago announcing her son’s death “as a martyr” on November 13 – a typical way that the Islamic State notifies families of casualties.
Besides the Bataclan attackers, police have established that Bilal Hadfi, 20-year-old French national, and M.al-Mahmod, had blown themselves up at Stade de France. He was the only member of the group to stay in the country with ISIS.
Investigators believe two brothers from the group, Mourad and Yassine Boudjellal, were killed while fighting with ISIS.
They have seized 398 weapons, including 39 “weapons of war”.
All the attackers identified so far have been from France or Belgium, native French speakers who joined the Islamic State.
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Almost 1,500 people were watching the Californian band Eagles of Death Metal play at the Bataclan when the gunmen burst in last month, leaving 90 dead and hundreds hurt, mostly people aged under 40.
