Bataclan attacker’s father tried to bring back son from Syria

Mohamed Amimour told Le Monde last year of mission to rescue son, Samy, Bataclan theatre attacker who wore suicide vest

The father of one of the gunmen who killed scores of concert-goers in Paris had tried unsuccessfully last year to bring his son back from Syria, where he had joined Islamic State.

Mohamed Amimour, 67, spoke about his failed attempt to extract his son, Samy, from the control of IS commanders, telling Le Monde afterwards how he had been greeted with coldness and “a distant sort of smile.:

Samy Amimour, 28, has been identified as one of the attackers at the Bataclan theatre. His father had urged his son to renounce his jihadi beliefs. In June 2014, Mohamed Amimour, who is of French-Algerian descent, set out on a private family mission to rescue his son, crossing the Turkish border and travelling to the Syrian city of Minbej, near Aleppo.

On his return last year, he explained to the French newspaper Le Monde how he had failed to persuade Samy to return home. “Daesh are highly organised,” he said. “They use a telephone chip just once. You can never call them back again.”

Amimour had kept in contact with Samy through conversations on Skype but did not tell his son he was flying out to see him. The 67-year-old was smuggled across the Turkish border in a minibus near Gaziantep and driven south across a minefield in the desert to Minbej where he first saw the black Isis flags.

“He was with another man who never left us alone. Our reunion was very cold. [My son] didn’t invite me back to his lodgings, he didn’t say how he had been wounded nor whether he had been fighting,”