Footage emerges of Hayat Boumeddiene as police step up search for accomplices | World news | The GuardianFootage emerges of Hayat Boumeddiene as police step up search for accomplices | World news | The Guardian










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France



Footage emerges of Hayat Boumeddiene as police step up search for accomplices









Video emerges of Paris gunman’s partner arriving in Turkey as authorities say six members of terror cell may be at large
























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CCTV footage purportedly showing Hayat Boumeddiene, the partner of Paris gunman Amedy Coulibaly, arriving in Istanbul last week. 



Alexandra Topping in Paris and 
Julian Borger


Tuesday 13 January 2015 04.11 EST







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Police in France are searching for possible accomplices of the gunmen who carried out last week’s terrorist attacks, as video footage was released of the partner of one of the attackers arriving in Turkey with another man.
The video shows Hayat Boumeddiene, now France’s most wanted woman, at immigration at Istanbul airport on 2 January, six days before her partner, Amédy Coulibaly, killed a policewoman in Paris. Coulibaly went on to murder four hostages at a kosher supermarket, before being killed in a shootout with police. On Monday the French government said it was clear he had help.
In the Istanbul footage, Boumeddiene is accompanied by Mehdi Sabri Belhouchine, a 23-year-old French national whose name had not appeared in connection with the attacks, and who was not on a terrorist watchlist. After crossing Turkey, the pair are said by Turkish authorities to have gone into part of Syria controlled by Islamic State (Isis), to which Coulibaly declared his allegiance before his death.

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

There are some reports that Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, the two gunmen who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices and killed 12 people on Wednesday, had help. Some witnesses have talked of a third person at the scene of the attack on the magazine.
French police officials said on Monday that as many as six members of the terrorist cell involved in the attacks may still be at large, including a man who was seen driving a car registered to Boumeddiene.
Two French police officials told Associated Press that authorities were searching the Paris area for the Mini Cooper registered to Boumeddiene.
The prime minister, Manuel Valls, has warned that “the threat is still present”, and 10,000 French troops were due to be deployed to bolster police protection of schools and other possible terrorist targets.
“The work on these attacks, on these terrorist and barbaric acts, continues … because we consider that there are most probably some possible accomplices,” he told BFM television. “The hunt will go on.”
Valls referred in particular to Coulibaly, who may have had help from accomplices apart from Boumeddiene, with whom he lived in Paris. Someone edited and posted a video of him justifying his actions on Sunday morning, after his death in the shootout on Friday. At least one segment of the video, in which Coulibaly swears allegiance to Isis, was evidently filmed after the wave of attacks began last Wednesday as the noise of news reports can be heard in the background. That was five days after Boumeddiene left France for Turkey.
The French troops are expected to be sent around the country to reinforce nearly 5,000 police providing security at Jewish schools and cultural centres, as well as stations and other possible targets.
“This is the first time that our troops have been mobilised to such an extent on our own soil,” said the defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, after a national security crisis meeting attended by François Hollande, Valls, the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, and the heads of police and security services. “The threats remain and we have to protect ourselves from them. It is an internal operation that will mobilise almost as many men as we have in our overseas operations.”
Valls announced that new measures to tackle extremism – including the possibility of separating extremists while in prison – would be made this week. “We’re making war against terrorism, against jihadism and against radical Islam,” Valls said in an interview on RMC Radio. “One of the individuals probably had an accomplice.”
The police are also investigating two further cases that may be linked to the attacks. A 32-year-old man jogging in the southern Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses on Wednesday was shot with the Tokarev gun later found at the kosher supermarket, the French prosecutor said. Police are also investigating a car explosion – which resulted in no casualties – on Thursday in Villejuif, a town in the southern suburbs of Paris. In the video posted online, Coulibaly claimed he had bombed a car.
Turkey’s foreign minister said that Boumeddiene had crossed into Syria on Thursday, the day Coulibaly shot dead Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a 27-year-old newly trained policewoman.
Turkish media claimed that when Boumeddiene and Belhoucine first entered Turkey, officers of the risk analysis centres, recently established at airports and customs in order to prevent foreign fighters entering Syria and Iraq, found the pair suspicious and started to follow them in Istanbul. They stayed at a hotel in Kadiköy, a district bordering the sea on the Asian side of Istanbul, until 3 January. The hotel management of the Bade hotel refused to comment, but witnesses told Turkish reporters that the pair had left the hotel only twice while staying there.
Turkish secret intelligence officials said that no information had previously been shared by their French colleagues on either Boumeddiene or Belhoucine, and that they therefore abandoned the investigation of the pair who are not reported to have made contact with anyone else while staying in Istanbul.
According to Turkish police the couple’s phone signal was picked up on 4 January in Sanliurfa, a city close to the Syrian border, from where Boumeddiene and Belhoucine are thought to have travelled to Akcakale, a crossing point on a stretch of the Syrian border occupied by Isis. It is thought the two French nationals crossed into Syria from Akcakale.
The investigation into the Paris attacks also extends to Yemen, where authorities say that the Kouachi brothers were given weapons training in 2011 by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap). A Yemeni journalist and researcher, Mohammed al-Kibsi, said Saïd Kouachi, the elder brother, had been a neighbour of an Aqap bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, arrested in December 2009 after a failed attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner with explosives hidden in his underwear.
“We went [to] the residence buildings where Umar Farouk lived and by accident we found him playing football with children in the street, so we talked to him,” Kibsi said. “He said he knew Umar Farouk and that they lived in the same residence, which was part of a Sana’a centre for Arabic studies. He seemed a nice, polite person and seemed relaxed about asking him questions even though he knew we were from the press.”
Al-Kibsi saw Kouachi two more times in Sana’a, in 2011 and 2012, but did not speak to him again. He had no idea of Kouachi’s own terrorist involvement, or that he had a brother, until he saw their pictures in the press after last week’s attacks.
French police will pay their respects on Tuesday to the three officers who died in the attacks, at police headquarters in Paris. Valls announced that a further homage to the victims would be held at the Invalides on Friday.



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