We wish he’d burnt to death says family of bomb ringleader
THE family of Paris terror mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud declared yesterday he should have been ‘burnt to death’.
In the Moroccan hamlet where his father Omar was born, they have only just heard of the massacre he organised, leaving 129 dead.
But their verdict was immediate: Abaaoud had no rightful place on this earth. ‘We rejoice the news he is dead. He deserved it,’ said Sayeed Abaaoud, a cousin of the killer and a village elder and patriarch of the clan.
‘I say he should have been burnt to death – because what he did was not allowed under Islam or any law.’
The Islamic State killer’s death at the hands of French anti-terrorist police was confirmed yesterday. The 27-year-old was shot in the head by a sniper then hit by
‘Real Muslims don’t do what he did’
grenades during the raid in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis on Wednesday. He had to be identified by his saliva.
A police source said Moroccan intelligence had tipped off the French government about Abaaoud. He was killed alongside Hasna Ait Boulahcen, his 26-year-old cousin, who blew herself up.
He had been thought to have planned the massacre from Syria until intelligence placed him in Paris for Friday’s attacks.
Father-of-eight Sayeed, 65, said: ‘It is terrible, just terrible. I know it happened a week ago, but we only just heard about what Abdelhamid did, on Moroccan radio. We don’t have TV.
‘When we heard about what he did, we felt very, very upset. We could not believe it. What he did was dreadful.
‘But Abdelhamid was brought up in Brussels, and he went to Syria. He has never been here.
‘This place is innocent of what Abdelhamid did.’
Nestled in hills about 60 miles from the beach resort of Agadir, the Abaaoud ancestral seat consists of 15 homes surrounded by mud and stone walls and argan trees.
Goats, sheep, children and a donkey mingle in dusty courtyards and the income from farming is about £30 a month.
The killer’s father, Omar Abaaoud, 65, left for France aged ten, taken by his father who left to work as a miner.
A picture emerged yesterday of a young Abdelhamid Abaaoud lining up proudly alongside his classmates for a school photo.
His parents, wanting to give their bright son the best start in life, had enrolled him in one of the Brussels’ most exclusive colleges, Saint-Pierre College – 30 minutes’ drive from their own rundown suburb.
He was a popular pupil, remembered as a practical joker who enjoyed flirting with girls.
But the image, believed to have been taken when he was ten or 11, is a far cry from the man he became.
Yesterday his relatives expressed sorrow and shame that their name has been linked with such appalling horror.
Sayeed said: ‘We feel very upset by the whole thing. Real Muslims do not do what Abdelhamid did. A good Muslim doesn’t steal or hurt people, so he is not a Muslim.’
French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve revealed yesterday the killer had been linked to at least four foiled plots in France this year. He said the French were informed of Abaaoud’s whereabouts on Monday by an intelligence service ‘outside of Europe’.
Wednesday’s raid was launched after a discarded mobile phone and tapped telephone conversations led investigators to a series of safe houses, with the suggestion that Abaaoud may have been holed up in a flat less than a mile from the Stade de France, where one of the attacks took place.
Eight suspects were arrested, including one woman and a man whose flat was used as a hideout by the terror cell.
Reports suggested that the jihadis were set to carry out another attack in Paris, targeting Charles de Gaulle airport the city’s financial district La Defense.
Estate agent Amel Alla told Sky News yesterday she saw Abaaoud drinking and smoking outside the flats on Saturday between 3pm and 4pm.
She said: ‘I saw him in Muslim dress, down at the building with all these guys, perhaps eight or ten of them.
‘I noticed him because he was wearing Islamic dress with the hat… the others were in normal clothes, they always are. Afterwards we saw the TV and my sister said to me, “Isn’t that the guy we saw the other day?”
‘I am 99.9 per cent sure it was him, it is crazy.
‘They were there like smoking joints and drinking beers.’
Yesterday in Morocco, Sayeed called a family crisis meeting to discuss the Paris atrocity.
The Abaaoud family are Berbers, an ethnic group in Northern Africa who call themselves ‘Amazighs’, meaning ‘noble men’. ‘We are Berbers, a peaceloving people,’ Sayeed said, sipping mint tea as he sat cross-legged on a rug on the stone floor.
‘It is shocking to think that a family from here has produced this monstrous man after just two generations of growing up in Europe. Omar was about ten years old when his father Hmaad – Abdelhamid’s grandfather – took him away to France.
‘It was the 1960s, and a Frenchman came here to bring men to France to work there in the mines. Lots of men went, it was very easy then, and none of them asked any questions about what it would be like there.
‘But I think for many of them it was very hard. It wasn’t as simple as they all thought.
‘Omar’s family didn’t like France, so they moved to Belgium, and they liked it there better, but Abdelhamid grew up and became full of hate.’
In Morocco Omar’s whitewashed house, next to a small mosque and a classroom for the hamlet’s 12 children, stands empty. ‘It must be the worst thing in the world for a father to feel, to know that his son has done this terrible thing,’ Sayeed said.
‘He became full of hate’