Police have identified the third Bataclan attacker as a French citizen after Islamic State told his mother recently he died “a martyr” the day of the Paris attack.
Foued Mohamed-Aggad left France for Syria in December, 2013, telling his family he was leaving to be a suicide bomber in Iraq and would not return, reported The Associated Press. He was flagged as a radical, according to his mother, but a warrant was not put out for his arrest.
Police had been unable to identify him as the third Bataclan attacker for nearly a month, until his mother got a text from Syria 10 days ago informing her of his death as a martyr Nov. 13 — the day of the Paris attacks. She sent police a DNA sample that matched the unidentified Bataclan attacker.
“Without the mother, there would have been nothing,” his brother’s lawyer told the AP.
About a dozen others from his city, including his brother, traveled to the war around that time and are now under arrest in France on terror-related charges. The man believed to have recruited them, Mourad Fares, is also in custody.
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. The Bataclan attackers stormed the concert venue together, carrying guns and grenades and wearing suicide vests. Two of the three detonated their vests when special forces entered the building, and the vest of a third detonated when he was shot by special forces.
The three French citizens are responsible for a large majority of the 130 deaths that Friday.
“What kind of human being could do what he did?” Mohamed-Aggad’s father Said told a Parisian paper, according to the AP. “If I had known he would do something like this, I would have killed him.”
One of the attackers remains unidentified, and two of the suicide bombers at the soccer stadium are believed to have been carrying fake passports. All of the attackers identified so far are French-speaking citizens of France or Belgium.
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