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 (Isis).
Mohamed Amimour, 67, spoke about his failed attempt to extract his son, Samy, from the control of Isis commanders, telling the French newspaper Le Monde afterwards how he had been greeted with coldness and “a distant sort of smile”.
Samy Amimour, 28, who was born in Drancy, a north-eastern suburb of Paris, has been identified as one of the attackers at the Bataclan theatre. He wore a suicide vest and blew himself up on Friday evening as French police closed in.
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 town of Minbej, near Aleppo.
On his return last year, he explained to Le Monde how he had failed to persuade Samy to return home. “Daesh [Isis] 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.
“At the first checkpoint there was a man with a Kalashnikov,” he recalled. “My travelling companions applauded [when they arrived]. My passport was taken. The new jihadi recruits were greeted by a crowd of bearded men with cries of ‘Allahu akbar’.”
Amimour waited. He was not allowed to smoke. It was the day that the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared an Islamic caliphate. Standing outside a cybercafe, he was picked up by an Isis patrol and taken to a mosque where he was ordered to attend prayers.
The next day, Amimour was reunited with his son. He described Samy as having a “distant sort of smile”.
Amimour said: “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.”
That evening he gave Samy a letter from his mother in which he had hidden €100 (£70) . His father remembered: “He went into a corner to read it, then gave me back the cash, saying he didn’t have any need of money.”
Amimour, hurt by the coldness of their encounter, talked to other jihadi fighters, who showed him videos of men being tortured by the forces of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president.
Amimour said: “One of my son’s colleagues showed me a film where they themselves killed men at close quarters. I saw horrible images. I was sickened.”
Two days later Amimour crossed back over the Syrian-Turkish border alongside a French woman from Montpellier, whom he remembered as having green eyes and carrying a six-month-old baby. “Her husband was learning how to commit a suicide attack. She seemed happy.”
Amimour flew home from Istanbul. He was not debriefed by the police. He later learned that his son had married and changed his name to Abu Hajia.
“I don’t want him to stay down there for the rest of his life,” he told Le Monde last year.
