Paris: Police has taken the father and brother of a French gunman into custody linked to a string of deadly Paris attacks and were searching their homes, a source close to the probe said.
The body of the 29-year-old French national was found and identified at the Bataclan music hall where 89 people were shot dead Friday when three gunmen wearing suicide vests opened fire on spectators in the bloodiest of a string of attacks in Paris blamed on Islamists.
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France's worst ever attacks killed at least 129 people and left 352 injured, many in critical condition.
Investigators were also searching the homes of friends and relatives of the Frenchman, another source close to the enquiry said yesterday.
The father's house is located in the small town of Romilly-sur-Seine, some 130 kilometres east of Paris, while his brother's is south of Paris in the Essonne region.
The brother, who is 34, contacted the police on his own initiative and was then taken into custody.
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The Frenchman confirmed as one of the attackers was known to police as being close to radical Islam but had never been linked to a terrorism enquiry, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said earlier yesterday.
He was identified via a severed fingertip.
Prosecutor Molins said seven gunmen were killed in the attacks, which were the work of three coordinated teams. Six of them blew themselves up while one was shot by police.
Greek authorities have confirmed that a man who died in the attacks with a Syrian passport found next to him had registered as a refugee on the of island of Leros in October.
French police said the passport was found "near the body of one of the attackers" after the Bataclan carnage, and had also asked Greece to check on the fingerprints of another man.
Earlier information from a Greek police source that he too had registered on Leros was later refuted.
The passport is still being checked, but it indicates the attackers may have had links to Syria and could have been among the thousands of people that have fled the country's civil war for Europe.
German police arrested a man on November 5 after machine-guns, hand guns and explosives were found in his vehicle during a routine check on a motorway.
Bavaria's state premier Horst Seehofer said there was reason to believe he had links to the attackers, and that the case "shows how important it is for us to have some clarity on who is in our country".
But Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere rejected the link, and made an "urgent plea to avoid drawing such swift links to the situation surrounding refugees".
