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Charlie Hebdo attack



Paris terrorist attacks: gunman’s girlfriend evades French police









Hayat Boumeddiene thought to be in Syria after leaving France days before Charlie Hebdo attack and supermarket siege














Members of the public pay tribute to the victims of this week’s attacks at Place de la Republique in Paris. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images




Jon Henley, 
Kim Willsher and 
Anne Penketh in Paris


Saturday 10 January 2015 14.03 EST







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After three days of bloodshed that left 20 people including three gunmen dead, a desperate police search seemed unlikely to find the partner of one of the three Islamists shot and killed by police in twin raids on Friday.
Citing “very reliable police sources”, French media, including Le Monde and Agence France-Presse, reported that Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, flew from Madrid to Istanbul on 2 January, accompanied by a man “known to French intelligence services”.
From there she reportedly crossed into Syria on 8 January, failing to use her return ticket booked for 9 January.
About 1,500 troops were stationed around Paris on Saturday as police hunted the “armed and dangerous” Boumeddiene, the girlfriend of Amedy Coulibaly, who died on Friday evening when heavily armed elite forces stormed a Jewish supermarket in Paris where he was holding at least 15 people hostage.
Coulibaly had earlier shot dead four shoppers, identified on Saturday as Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen and François-Michel Saada, when he entered the kosher store on the Avenue de la Porte de Vincennes on Friday lunchtime brandishing two Kalashnikov assault rifles.
In a second, near-simultaneous assault with stun grenades and assault rifles, French special forces also shot dead Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, the brothers behind the killing of 12 people, including two police officers, at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday.



Hayat Boumeddiene had been in a relationship with Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who took at least 15 hostage in a Jewish supermarket.
Photograph: Getty Images


The president, François Hollande, called an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday morning, having urged “vigilance, unity and mobilisation” the night before as he warned that the French people should be prepared for more violence.
In an emotional speech in Évry, where he is mayor, the prime minister, Manuel Valls, said there would be “a before and an after”, adding: “We must not lower our guard. Terrorism tried to create splits, and damage us. It must not win.”
As the hunt intensified for Boumeddiene, wanted by police in connection with Coulibaly’s fatal shooting of a female police officer in Montrouge on Thursday, France’s shell-shocked citizens rallied around the country in tribute to the victims.
A reported 700,000 people poured on to the streets in cities including Nice, Orléans, Rouen and Caen, with a reported 30,000 assembling in Pau, 45,000 in Lille and 80,000 in Toulouse.
A mammoth march of national unity, expected to draw up to a million people, is due to take place in Paris on Sunday, with up to 5,500 police and soldiers standing guard, said the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve.
The British prime minister, David Cameron, and many other national leaders, including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Spanish and Italian prime ministers, Mariano Rajoy and Matteo Renzi, are to join Hollande for the occasion.



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Marchers in Toulouse hold signs saying “I am Charlie” and “I am against fascism” during tributes across France on Saturday.
Photograph: Pascal Pavani/AFP/Getty


Paris’s Jewish community was in shock. Teacher Isaac Berg was in the kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes 15 minutes before Friday’s hostage-taking.
“We’re afraid, but what more could the government do to protect us?” he said. “Our schools and places of worship have already been guarded for the last two years. People wouldn’t want a police escort to go shopping.”
Cazeneuve joined large crowds from the Jewish community who gathered outside the supermarket to pay tribute to the four Jewish victims of the hostage-taking.
Accompanied by a number of ministers and lawmakers as well as the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, he pledged to ensure “the protection of the Jews of France”. Cazeneuve said racism and antisemitism “have no place in the republic”.
Many of those present held up sheets of paper marked with the Twitter hashtag #jesuisjuif, reflecting the global solidarity with the victims of Wednesday’s attack expressed through the hashtag #jesuischarlie. Others carried the names of the victims or laid flowers at the site.
In Montrouge, scene of Coulibaly’s attack, the synagogue and Jewish school close to where the shooting took place was under armed guard. Several residents said they were convinced the building was his real target and that he had shot the policewoman only after being stopped by a traffic accident which she was investigating.
Boumeddiene is one of seven children. Now 26, she was placed in foster care aged eight or nine with several of her siblings when their father, a delivery driver, was unable to care for them following their mother’s death in 1994.
She married Coulibaly – in a religious ceremony which she did not attend and which is not recognised in French law – in July 2009. The couple lived together in a flat in Bagneux, a Paris suburb, and Coulibaly had reportedly moved back in with her after he was released from jail last year.



Le Monde online states that this photograph was taken of Hayat Boumeddiene in 2010. 
Photograph: Le Monde


The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, revealed there had been “constant and sustained” telephone contact – more than 500 calls last year – between Boumeddiene and Izzana Hamyd, the wife of Chérif Kouachi.
Boumeddiene also reportedly accompanied Coulibaly and Chérif on visits to Djamel Beghal, a radical preacher under house arrest in the Cantal in southern France. Le Monde published photographs of her in a forest, wearing a niqab, apparently training with a crossbow.
A devout Muslim, Boumeddiene lost her job as a supermarket cashier, Le Parisien reported, because she insisted on wearing a niqab. In a 2010 police interview obtained by Le Monde, she also told police she was doubtful about the true extent of her partner’s faith: “Amedy isn’t really very religious. He likes having fun.”
Questions were starting to be asked about how the three men, all with known jihadi links, had managed to evade intelligence agencies. The trio had been in intensive telephone contact, police said. Valls said on Friday the twin attacks indicated there had been “clear failings” in intelligence.
Chérif Kouachi, 32, was jailed for 18 months for his role in a network, of which Coulibaly was also a member, that sent volunteers to fight alongside al-Qaida in Iraq between 2003 and 2005. Saïd, 34, travelled in 2011 to Yemen, where he received weapons training from al-Qaida in Yemen.
Coulibaly, 32, reportedly met Chérif in prison. Both men were also implicated in a 2013 plot to break an Algerian Islamist, Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, out of the high-security prison in Paris where he was serving a life sentence.
BFMTV revealed on Friday night that it had been in telephone contact with Chérif from inside the printing warehouse earlier in the day. In a calm, assured voice, the gunman could be heard saying he had been sent by al-Qaida Yemen.
Saying it had not released the tapes earlier to avoid compromising the police operations, BFM TV also replayed a conversation it had with Coulibaly in which he said the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Montrouge police officer had been synchronised. He also said he had targeted the Paris supermarket “because it was Jewish”, and claimed to be a member of Islamic State.
The family of Ahmed Merabet, one of the officers murdered outside the offices of Charlie Hebdo, made an emotional appeal for calm. “You mustn’t mix up extremism with Muslims,” said the officer’s brother, Malek Merabet.
“The mad men have no colour nor religion. Islam is a religion of peace, of love. My brother was a Muslim and he was killed by two terrorists, by false Muslims.”
On the run since their deadly assault on Wednesday, the Kouachi brothers died in a hail of bullets as they came out shooting from the warehouse of a small printing business in Dammartin-en-Goële, about 25 miles north-east of Paris, where they had been cornered since early morning on Friday.
They took the manager of the company hostage but let him go after he treated Saïd for a neck injury. Another employee, Lilian Lepere, 27, stayed undetected on the second floor of the warehouse throughout the siege, sending text messages to the forces surrounding the building.
Similarly, up to five people, including a three-year-old boy, managed to survive inside a refrigerator for five hours at the Porte de Vincennes supermarket, the prosecutor’s office said. Police were reportedly able to pinpoint their location by their mobile phones.
Agence France-Presse reported that Coulibaly had telephoned friends during the ensuing siege, demanding that they mount further attacks. RTL radio also released a recording of him threatening hostages, demanding France “stop attacking the Islamic State, stop unveiling our women, stop putting our brothers in prison for nothing at all”.



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Charlie Hebdo attack




France




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Islamic State (Isis)




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more on this story














Cherif Kouachi during 2008 terror trial: 'I've been set up' - video

File footage of one of the Paris gunmen, Cherif Kouachi, arriving at court in 2008 on charges of helping to funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency



Published: 13 Jan 2015




Cherif Kouachi during 2008 terror trial: 'I've been set up' - video












Analysis Charlie Hebdo attackers: born, raised and radicalised in Paris

The radicalisation of the Kouachi brothers began in a picturesque park in the capital while Amédy Coulibaly took the first steps towards terrorism in prison, but what the three had in common was growing up on the margins of French society



Published: 12 Jan 2015




Charlie Hebdo attackers: born, raised and radicalised in Paris












Paris shootings: investigation launched into where gunmen got GoPro cameras

Officials try to pinpoint when and where cameras found in possession of Kouachi brothers and Amédy Coulibaly were obtained



Published: 12 Jan 2015




Paris shootings: investigation launched into where gunmen got GoPro cameras












Paris attacks: 10,000 troops deployed as France hunts for accomplices

Mobilisation of 10,000 troops to guard potentially vulnerable locations comes as prime minister warns that ‘threat still present’



Published: 12 Jan 2015




Paris attacks: 10,000 troops deployed as France hunts for accomplices














Paris shootings: Jewish school ‘likely target’ of gunman Coulibaly




Published: 12 Jan 2015




Paris shootings: Jewish school ‘likely target’ of gunman Coulibaly








Analysis Mentor of Charlie Hebdo gunmen has been UK-based




Published: 11 Jan 2015




Mentor of Charlie Hebdo gunmen has been UK-based








Paris gunman Amedy Coulibaly declared allegiance to Isis




Published: 11 Jan 2015




Paris gunman Amedy Coulibaly declared allegiance to Isis








Charlie Hebdo: a letter to my British friends

Olivier Tonneau




Published: 13 Jan 2015




Charlie Hebdo: a letter to my British friends
















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