A severed finger led to the identity of one of the Paris bombing terrorists, Ismaïl Omar Mostefai whose father is an Algerian trucker and whose mother is Portuguese.
The assertion that the mother was Portuguese was hotly denied by the Secretary of State for Portuguese Communities after checking records at the Portuguese consulate in Paris and at the Civil Registry.
Today it was confirmed that the 29-year-old Ismaïl Omar Mostefai was one of five children born to a Portuguese mother. They were raised in Courcouronnes, a suburb in the south of Paris. Ismaïl Omar Mostefi blew himself up at the Bataclan concert venue last Friday night.
His mother Lúcia Moreira Fernandes came from Povoa de Varzim in Braga as a child and seems never to have returned to Portugal. She had emigrated to France with her parents and has never had a Portuguese ID. She currently holds a French passport.
The woman converted to the Muslim religion and married Mohammed, a truck driver of Algerian origin with whom she had six children, four boys, Ismaïl being the second, and two girls.
Ismaïl Omar Mostefai was one of the suicide bombers who went to the Bataclan concert venue with explosives strapped to his body and opened fire on the crowd before detonating the charges strapped to his body.
Ismaïl Omar Mostefaï was known to police, had not been linked to any terrorism inquiry, frequently attended the Generation 2000 mosque in Chartres and the French authorities had him down as being at risk of radicalisation.
Mostefai is understood to have moved south to Chartres in 2009 and he was flagged as a possible radical.
The president of the Chaters mosque said he did not know Mostefai. "We expel people who do not respect our rules or behave strangely, and we report them to the authorities," he told AFP news agency.
Le Monde reported that Mostefai may have left Chartes for several months to visit Syria around January 2014 as there are records of his passing through Turkey in October 2013, before the intelligence services again picked up his trail in early 2014 as they observed a small group of Salafists in Chartres.
