The third Bataclan attacker has been identified by French police as a 23-year-old French national who went to Syria two years ago but was not picked up by intelligence as a threat on his return.
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Mohamed-Aggad’s father, Said, told Le Parisien that he had only learned of his son’s role in the Bataclan massacre through the media and “would have killed him beforehand” if he had known that he would go on to carry out such an attack.
The Associated Press reported that Mohamed-Aggad and a group of about a dozen young men left Strasbourg for Syria in late 2013.
“The SMS message told her that her son had died, saying: ‘He died on November 13 with his brothers”, said Francoise Cotta, lawyer for the mother and her family. The text prompted her to contact Paris police and to undergo a DNA test which confirmed her son’s participation in the blasts. Their suspected recruiter for the Islamic Statealso is under arrest in France. Two of the gunmen killed themselves by detonating suicide vests and the third was fatally shot by police.
He had also been on the radar of French security services as a potential extremist, a judicial source said, and had probably travelled to Syria on false papers.
Paris: The father of the third gunman within the assault on the Bataclan live performance corridor in Paris stated Wednesday he would “have killed” his son had he recognized what he was planning.
Jesse Hughes (R) and Julian Dorio, members of Eagles of Death Metal band, mourn in front of the Bataclan concert hall to pay tribute to the shooting victims in Paris, France, December 8, 2015.
The Bataclan cafe near the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris after the attack.
He was born in Strasbourg and was recruited by some Mourad Fares, one of the main jihadist recruiters in France.
All claimed to have gone to do humanitarian work, but prosecutors believe they meant to fight for Isis, which claimed responsibility for the carnage in Paris.
“Without the mother, there would have been nothing”, his brother’s lawyer told the AP. “What kind of human being could do what he did?”
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Another terrorist at Bataclan has been identified as Samy Amimour, 28, from Drancy, a commune in the northeastern suburbs of Paris. U2 had four scheduled concerts before French President Francois Hollande announced a state of emergency following the deadly attacks, but two of them had to be postponed and reprogramed for this week.
