PARIS: A 23-year-old man from the eastern French city of Strasbourg has been identified as the third gunman involved in the attack at Paris’s Bataclan music hall, police sources said Wednesday.
Foued Mohamed Aggad went to Syria with his brother and a group of friends at the end of 2013, according to a source close to the investigation.
The two other attackers involved in the massacre of 90 concertgoers — Omar Ismail Mostefai, 29, and 28-year-old former Paris bus driver Samy Amimour — had also been in Syria.
Two of the gunmen blew themselves up with suicide belts packed with explosives after the killing spree, the worst of the November 13 Paris attacks. The third was shot by police who stormed the venue.
Most of a group of six men from Strasbourg who went to Syria with Aggad were arrested in the Meinau area of the city on their return in May last year, but Aggad stayed on, the source said.
Investigators believe two brothers, Mourad and Yassine Boudjellal, were killed there fighting with the militant Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) before it restyled itself as the militant IS group.
When questioned on their return, the men, aged between 23 and 26, claimed they had been horrified by what they had witnessed in Syria and started to dribble back to France from February 2014.
Aggad was identified at the end of last week after his DNA was matched with those of his family members, the police source said.
Police suspect the men had been recruited by Mourad Fares, who was known to French intelligence for recruiting militants through social media and the Internet.
The arrested men claimed they had gone to Syria for humanitarian work but are suspected of joining the militant IS group.
Nearly 1,500 people were watching the Californian band Eagles of Death Metal play when the shooting began last month, leaving 90 dead and hundreds hurt, mostly young people.
The band made an emotional return to the venue on Tuesday, with lead singer Jesse Hughes in tears as he laid a single flower among the piles of tributes to the dead.
The Bataclan’s owners have said they want to reopen the hall at the end of next year and the Eagles of Death Metal say they want to play in the first concert.