Foued Mohamed Aggad returned from Syria undetected and was reportedly subject of two warnings from Turkey before Paris attacks

French anti-terror police are investigating how a known jihadi was able to return to France undetected to carry out a massacre at the Bataclan concert hall in which 90 people died.

The third gunman, who blew himself up during the attack, was identified on Wednesday as 23-year-old Foued Mohamed Aggad, from Strasbourg, whose name was on a police “security list”.

He had remained with Islamic State in Syria after his brother and friends returned to France in February 2014 where they were later arrested and charged with having links to a terrorist organisation. According to family members, Aggad appears to have travelled back to France some time between August and November.

On 13 November he was one of a commando group made up of radicalised Europeans who carried out a series of shootings and suicide bombings in Paris that killed 130 people and injured hundreds more.

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The two other Bataclan gunmen have been identified as Omar Ismaïl Mostefai, 29, and Samy Amimour, 28. Police said Aggad’s identity was established at the end of last week when his DNA was matched with that of his mother.

Confirmation that all three Bataclan gunmen were French and slipped under the anti-terrorist radar comes at a critical time for France’s government. Local elections at the weekend showed a rise in support for the far-right Front National, which has criticised the Socialist administration’s security record.



Amimour, a former bus driver, was on a “Fiche S” security list and was supposed to report to police each week when he disappeared in September 2013. He later resurfaced in Syria. Mostefai had been on the S-list since 2010 and Turkey reportedly warned France at least twice before the Paris attacks that he posed a threat.

Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, confirmed on BFMTV that the third Bataclan man had been identified. “What is important is that the investigation is progressing, that the accomplices are found out, that arrests happen,” he said.

“This will all take time and in the face of the terrorist threat that is unfortunately here, we need to carry on with this work of tracking down terrorists because we are at war with radical Islam, with Daesh,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for Isis, which claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The French interior ministry estimates there are 1,683 French people “implicated” in Isis networks in Iraq and Syria. It believes that 457 of them are in the region while the rest have returned to Europe or are French citizens in contact with jihadi cells. An estimated 113 French fighters who joined Isis have been killed.



Number of foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria doubles in a year, report finds Read more

Aggad’s father, Saïd Mohamed Aggad, told Le Parisien: “He lied to us. He said he was going on holiday two years ago and he went to Syria. I thought he would die in Syria or Iraq, not come back here and do that.”



He added: “The last time I heard from him was four or five months ago via Skype. As usual, he didn’t say where he was or what he was doing. He spoke a lot about jihad. What can I say? It was like talking to someone different, someone who had been brainwashed. There wasn’t anything more to say to him.

“Each time there was a call, I was expecting to hear he had died in a bombing or something else. It would have been better that he died in Syria.”

Aggad, one of four children, was born in Wissembourg, a pretty town on the French-German border, and grew up in Meinau, a working class district of housing estates in south-west Strasbourg.

He and his friends would hang out in a cafe in Kehl, just the other side of the border in Germany, where police believe they planned their trip to Syria. The friends agreed to leave in small groups to avoid alerting their families or the authorities, and to meet up in a hotel near the airport at Hatay in southern Turkey, a familiar stop on the jihadi route to Syria.

Aggad, who was unknown to French police at the time, was one of the last to go, arriving at Hatay on 17 December 2013 after missing his plane when relatives of another would-be Isis recruit raced to the airport to persuade him not to go.

Two members of the group that went to Syria with Aggad were killed. All the others, except Aggad, returned to France in February 2014 after a few weeks in Syria. They were arrested three months later, a judicial source and other sources close to the situation told Reuters.

Aggad’s older brother Karim, 25, who also visited Syria, is in jail in France, along with the other members of the group who have been formally put under investigation for “links to a terrorist organisation”. The Frenchman alleged to have recruited them, Mourad Fares, is also in custody. All are charged with terror-related offences and face trial.

During their first appearance before a French judge, the young men said they had gone to Syria for “humanitarian reasons” and claimed they were shocked by the atrocities they saw being committed by Isis.

Aggad’s identity came to light 10 days ago after his wife in Syria sent his mother a text message in English announcing: “Your son died a martyr with his brothers on 13 November,” a typical way Isis notifies families of casualties.

The mother, who has not been named, gave French police a DNA sample which showed that one of her sons was killed inside the Bataclan, her lawyer told French journalists.

“Foued Mohamed Aggad’s mother received the message at the end of November. She immediately alerted me and we contacted the authorities,” said the lawyer, Françoise Cotta. “His brother wanted to return because he said he couldn’t accept the situation there. However, Foued told his mother he was very happy, that he had married and had just had a child.”

Aggad had told his family in August when they were last in contact with him that he was going to be a suicide bomber in Iraq and had no intention of returning to France, Cotta said. “The family has had no news of him since.”

Aggad’s mother told Le Parisien she had separated from the children’s father in 2007 and had recently sent money to her youngest son in Syria where he was living with his French wife and newborn child. “He couldn’t get out of the country. But I didn’t ask any more questions. The money was to pay someone to get him out of the country,” she said.

The latest information confirms that all assailants identified so far were French or Belgian and all native French speakers. All three Bataclan attackers were killed, two by detonating suicide vests and one shot by police.

David Thomson (@_DavidThomson) Deux autres photos de Foued, 3e kamikaze du Bataclan, également postées sur sa page Facebook en 2014 pic.twitter.com/7du4YMN4c7

David Thomson, a journalist with Radio France International and an expert on French jihadis, posted photos of Aggad on Twitter. Thomson told France Bleu Alsace that Aggad was a “small-time jihad celebrity”.

He said: “He wasn’t in hiding … one might have thought he’d have problems crossing the border and yet, he crossed.”

