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Charlie Hebdo attack



Paris attackers may have links with Spanish terrorist cell









French and Spanish police investigate possibility of Islamist group in Madrid after reports of Coulibaly visit over new year














A French officer guards the kosher supermarket where Amedy Coulibaly killed four people. Photograph: Zuma/Rex




Kim Willsher in Paris and 
Ashifa Kassam in Madrid


Thursday 15 January 2015 09.53 EST







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Police are investigating whether the gunmen who killed 17 people in Paris last week had links with a terrorist cell in Spain.
One of the three Islamic fundamentalists involved in the bloody rampage, Amedy Coulibaly, was reported to have spent three days in Madrid over the new year. He was accompanied by an unidentified person, according to detectives in Spain.
Last week Coulibaly, 32, shot dead a trainee police officer in southern Paris before storming a kosher supermarket in the east of the French capital the following day and killing four hostages.
Coulibaly’s partner, Hayat Boumeddiene – the couple were married under Islamic law – travelled to Syria via Madrid and Istanbul before the attacks. Turkish authorities have said Boumeddiene crossed from Turkey into Syria on 8 January.



Police photos of Hayat Boumeddiene and her husband Amedy Coulibaly.
Photograph: Reuters


Spanish and French police were now trying to establish if there was a fundamentalist Islamic group in Madrid that gave logistical support to Coulibaly and the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who killed 12 people in the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. The Spanish high court said that it has opened a preliminary investigation into Coulibaly’s time in Spain. A judge will look into the activities of Coulibaly and Boumeddiene while they were in Madrid, as well as that of the third person who remains unidentified, said the court.  
Spanish media claimed the country’s security forces had established that Coulibaly was in Madrid from 30 December until 2 January and returned to France “accompanied by an individual who has yet to be identified”.
“Spanish anti-terrorist officers are investigating, in cooperation with their French counterparts, the activities of Coulibaly during his stay in Madrid and trying to determine who he could have been in contact with,” said a report from the Spanish daily La Vanguardia. “His presence in the city suggests there is, at least, a support cell in the capital of Spain.”
The Spanish interior minister, Jorge Fernandez Diaz, said recently that around a dozen of the 70 Spanish citizens who have joined the jihad in Syria and Iraq, had returned home since the beginning of 2015.
In Belgium, police were reportedly questioning a well-known arms dealer who is alleged to have supplied the weapons used in the Paris attacks.
Belgian media reported that the unnamed man handed himself in to police in the southern city of Charleroi. He told detectives he had been in touch with Coulibaly, and a search of his home allegedly found evidence connecting him with the gunman who died when police stormed the supermarket.
The dealer is said to have sold Coulibaly the Skorpion sub-machine gun used in the attack as well as a rocket-propelled grenade and the Kalashnikov assault rifles used by the Kouachi brothers, for less than €5,000.
According to the reports, the man said he swindled Coulibaly in a car sale, but police later found evidence that the two were negotiating about the sale of ammunition for a 7.62mm calibre firearm.
Bullets of this calibre are needed for the Tokarev pistol used by Coulibaly in the supermarket attack, and possibly in the shooting and injuring of a jogger two days earlier.
“The man is being held by the judge in Charleroi on suspicion of arms dealing,” a spokesman for Belgium’s federal prosecution said. “Further investigations will have to show whether there is a link with the events in Paris.”
On Thursday, the French president, François Hollande, sought to calm tensions after the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo was published featuring a drawing of the prophet Muhammad.
During a visit to the Institute du Monde Arabe (Institute of the Arab World) in Paris, which is holding a forum entitled Renewing the Arab World, Hollande told those present: “Muslims are the first victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism and intolerance.
“We must refuse to confuse the issues. French people of Muslim faith have the same rights, the same duties as all citizens. They must be protected. This is what secularism is about, it respects all religions. In the face of terrorism, we are all united.”
Hollande added: “Anti-Muslim acts, like antisemitic acts must be severely punished … the Middle East conflict is not to be played out here.”
On Thursday, the cartoonists Georges Wolinski, 80, and Bernard Verlhac, 57, who signed himself Tignous, were buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Economist Bernard Maris, known as “Uncle Bernard”, 68, and Elsa Cayat, a psychiatrist and regular writer for Charlie Hebdo, the only woman to die in the attack on the magazine, were also buried.



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The coffin of cartoonist Bernard ‘Tignous’ Verlhac is carried out of the town hall of Montreuil, near Paris, during his funeral.
Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images


The cartoonist Jean “Cabu” Cabut, 76, was buried on Wednesday at Châlons-en-Champagne, where he was born.
Cartoonist Philippe Honoré and the magazine’s editor in chief, Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, will be interred on Friday. Charb’s police protection officer Franck Brinsolaro was buried in a private ceremony on Thursday.



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François Hollande (R) with the president of the Institut du Monde Arabe, Jack Lang, in front of the institute building bearing the message ‘We are all Charlie’.
Photograph: Ian Langsdon/AFP/Getty Images





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