French citizen identified as third Bataclan attacker

23-year-old Frenchman Foued Mohamed-Aggad identified after his mother received a text message saying her son was dead and had died as a martyr. His friends were apparently unsure about Mohamed-Aggad’s naivete, as they told police that at first, they believed he truly wanted to do humanitarian work, but then was swept up in the Islamic State’s “cause”.

“I can’t believe it was him”, said Yazar Mesut, a 46-year-old neighbour, speaking in one of the town’s bars.

So far, all of the identified Paris attackers were Europeans trained by Islamic State extremists.

French officials said he traveled from Strasbourg to Syria with other radicalized young people in 2013. Almost three-quarters of the 130 who died in Paris that night were killed in the Bataclan concert venue.

A huge manhunt is still under way for one of the suspects in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, a French national who has been living in Belgium and whose brother Brahim blew himself up outside a bar.

The Paris prosecutor had earlier identified two other suicide bombers in the attack as Frenchmen Omar Ismail Mostefai and Sami Amimour. DNA tests on remains found at the Bataclan and on Mohamed-Aggad’s relatives were a match. Cotta declared Mohamed-Aggad had told his family months ago that he would go to Iraq to detonate a suicide bomb and that he would never go back to France, the lawyer told BFM television.

Aggad was from Strasbourg, France, and was known as a juvenile delinquent, authorities said.

On Wednesday, French media confirmed that a perpetrator in the attacks was identified by investigators as Foued Mohamed-Aggad, a 23-year-old resident of Meinau, a district of Strasbourg.

He says what makes Mohamed-Aggad slightly different is that he appears to have spent longer than the others in Syria. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Their journey was reportedly facilitated by an alleged French jihadist recruiter, Mourad Fares, who was later arrested in Turkey in 2014. Together the three men opened fire on the crowd at the Eagles of Death Metal concert.

A picture taken on 27 November shows French national flags, candles and flowers at a makeshift memorial in the Place de la Republique in Paris. Abaaoud was killed the week after the attacks in a dawn police raid near Paris.

But the Bataclan was by far the deadliest attack.