According to reports late Saturday, French police have identified one of the seven gunmen who killed at least 129 people in the attacks claimed by the self-styled Islamic State (IS) group.
French authorities named the first attacker as 29-year-old Omar Ismail Mostefai. The indentification was made possible by a severed finger found at Bataclan concert hall, scene of the worst of the bloodshed.
A second suspect was named by French media as “Abbdulakbak B”. According to Paris Chief Prosecutor Mollins, there were three teams involved in carrying out the attacks.
IS militants have claimed they were behind the gun and suicide attacks that left a trail of destruction at a sold-out concert hall, restaurants and bars, and outside France’s Stade de France national stadium. The attacks, which killed 129 people and wounded 352, including 99 critically, were the first ever suicide bombings on French soil. Unlike those in January, none of the assailants had ever been jailed for terror offences.
The discovery of a Syrian passport near the body of one attacker has raised suspicions some of the assailants might have entered Europe as part of an influx of people fleeing Syria’s civil war.
International investigators are still probing into what has been Paris’s worst ever attacks and what the French President has called “an act of war”.
