France Identifies 3rd Attacker at Bataclan Concert Hall
PARIS — The French authorities said on Wednesday that they had identified the third attacker at the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 people were killed during a coordinated series of assaults in and around Paris three weeks ago.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, referring to the third attacker, told BFM-TV that “he has been identified,” but he said “it is not up to me” to discuss the specifics of the investigation.
The French newspaper Le Parisien reported that the assailant was Foued Mohamed-Aggad, a 23-year-old from Strasbourg, France, who traveled to Syria with a group of would-be jihadists in late 2013.
Mr. Valls did not dispute that report. “What’s important is that the investigation is advancing, that those complicit are known, that arrests be made,” he said.
The other two assailants at the Bataclan were Samy Amimour, from Drancy, northeast of Paris, and Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, who lived for a time in Chartres, southwest of Paris. All three attackers died during the assault.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, claimed responsibility for the attacks that killed a total of 130 people at the Bataclan, the Stade de France, and at several restaurants and bars on Nov. 13. Many of the attackers had spent time in Syria before returning to Europe to carry out the massacre.
The police have been working to identify all the assailants, but it has been a painstaking process because some traveled under false names and, in some cases, their bodies were badly damaged after they detonated explosives in vests.
The police have yet to determine the identities of two of the attackers at the Stade de France who posed as migrants to cross into Europe through Greece, and of one of the gunmen who attacked the restaurants and bars, who later died in a police raid on an apartment in the Paris suburb of St.-Denis.