French militant killed in Syria, says coalition

A US-led coalition strike against Daesh’s last territorial stronghold in eastern Syria killed veteran French militant Fabien Clain, who voiced a recording claiming the November 2015 attacks on Paris, the coalition has said.

Clain became known as the French voice of Daesh after he read out the six-minute statement claiming the worst attack in France since World War Two.

In the recording, a man, believed to be his brother, gave a rallying cry to people to fight “without ever capitulating.”

“A coalition strike killed an active Daesh media official named Abu Anas al Faransi, also known as Fabien Clain, in Baghouz,” the coalition said in a statement posted on its Twitter feed late on Thursday.

It did not say when he was killed.

France Info radio and BFM TV reported on Feb.21 that Clain had been killed and his brother Jean-Michel seriously wounded after a coalition strike in Baghouz.

US and French sources said at the time the coalition was verifying the report. Clain is a longtime militant, jailed in the past for recruiting militant fighters and believed by French authorities to have fled to Syria in 2015.

They believe he played a bigger role in the Nov.13 2015 attacks than simply recording the claim. A squad of gunmen and suicide bombers killed 129 people and injured more than 350 in the attack on entertainment venues in the French capital.

Clain embraced Islam in the late 1990s. Like his younger brother, he is believed by French police to have become radicalised in the early 2000s when he lived in the southern city of Toulouse where he frequented radical networks.