Hunt is on for ‘Black Widow’ terror suspect
Alleged accomplice of Paris cop killer is considered ‘armed and dangerous’ and may already have made her way to Syria
PARIS— She’s not here, in France. She wasn’t there, in the Jewish grocery store. Hayat Boumeddiene may be on the lam but she started running more than a week ago, well before her boyfriend shot and killed an unarmed traffic cop, before he took hostages at Hyper Cacher, before he was brought down in a hail of police bullets. While Boumeddiene was named Thursday in arrest warrants as a suspected accomplice of Amedy Coulibaly in the killing of the young female officer and wounding of another, it’s become increasingly apparent that the homely 26-year-old left the country in advance of her lover’s jihadist crime spree, entering Turkey on Jan. 2, according to several reports quoting anonymous security sources in both countries, possibly via Spain.
In Turkey and purportedly en route to Syria.
Only militia fighters and Islamist zealots go to Syria these days. Boumeddiene appears to have been both, in the grooming and in the marrow.
Photographs posted on Twitter in 2010 show Boumeddiene, dressed in a billowing abaya, face covered by niqab veil, assuming the aggressive posture of an armed insurgent: firing a gun from the kneeling position and pointing a crossbow.
As of late Saturday, police here had not retracted their warrant for Boumeddiene, described earlier as “armed and dangerous.” She is still very much wanted in France, where her unsmiling face stares out from wanted posters. But she may be far beyond their reach already, even if still in Turkey. Where, by the way, a female suicide bomber on Tuesday killed a police officer manning a tourist information post. Female acolytes are very much prized by terrorist organizations for their easier ability to secrete bombs and suicide vests beneath roomy robes and the cultural proscription against touching women in Muslim countries.
It had initially been believed that Boumeddiene was with Coulibaly, 32, when he entered the kosher grocery store in eastern Paris on Friday and took hostages who had been shopping for the Sabbath, threatening to start killing captives if police made any move of force towards flushing out two fugitives pinned down in a printing warehouse at an industrial complex about 40 kilometres northeast of Paris — Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the homegrown terrorist brothers who massacred 10 journalists and cartoonists at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo Wednesday.
Then it was feared Boumeddiene somehow slipped away during the mayhem when commando troops launched their assault, the wait-it-out strategy abandoned after Coulibaly was heard praying aloud, as if in preparation for the likelihood of his own death. In fact, Coulibaly had already murdered four of the hostages.
With the trio of terrorists slain, Boumeddiene, already tagged the “Black Widow,” became the object of a massive police manhunt as the sole remaining plot participant who might provide crucial information that security services are desperately seeking about the co-ordinated attacks and whether the perpetrators had indeed taken their mission orders from either Al Qaeda or the Islamic State militant group, as both terrorist organizations are boastfully claiming.
If officials here got it wrong about Boumeddiene’s whereabouts, that would further undermine public faith in the ability of the intelligence and security agencies to protect the citizenry, just as many here are beginning to ask how the Kouachis and Coulibaly could stockpile arms — grenades, a rocket launcher, assault weapons, dynamite — when all had been, at some point, in the crosshairs of surveillance and two, Coulibaly and Chérif, had met in prison.
The threat has not abated with the deaths of the terrorists. France remains at a high alert level, heading toward a massive unity rally planned for Sunday. Estimates that a million people will be marching in the streets, joined by several world leaders flying in for the event, presents a staggering security challenge and a ripe soft target for violent belligerents.
News has emerged that terror sleeper cells were activated in France overnight Friday with police told to carry their weapons at all times and erase any identifying presence on social media. The modus operandi for Al Qaeda in the Yemen — Saïd Kouachi returned to France after receiving weapons training from them in 2011 — is the one-two strike: hitting again when emergency responders arrive to triage their handiwork.
The underground network of terrorist sympathizers and actual cadres in France may be well-known to security agencies, but Boumeddiene, as a “terror companion,’’ was viewed as potentially a tremendous font of operational knowledge. The chief prosecutor of Paris told a news conference Friday evening that investigators had found cellphone records that showed 500 calls made last year between Boumeddiene and the spouses of the Kouachi brothers, suggesting the three men were communicating through their women folk, to elude the possibility of electronic surveillance targeted at them.
On the evidence of this past week, Coulibaly had been so deeply radicalized that he had no problem murdering innocent bystanders in what now appears to be in lock-step with the Kouachis, first shooting dead the female police officer, then deliberately seeking out a Jewish business for the second stage of the plan.
He was not very bright, though. Agence France Press reports that Coulibaly made calls to friends and fellow travellers during the standoff at Hyper Cacher, demanding they mount further attacks. When French news station RTL managed to ring up Coulibaly as well, he seems to have opened the line while not actually answering. That line remained open, capturing a five-minute rant Coulibaly hurled at his more than dozen hostages, saying his actions were payback for French military action in Mali and Syria: “Every time, they try to make you think Muslims are terrorists. I was born in France. If they hadn’t been attacked elsewhere, I wouldn’t be here.”
He added: “I’ll tell them to stop attacking the Islamic State, stop unveiling our women, stop putting our brothers in prison for everything and anything.”
When the captives tried to argue that they were not responsible for the government’s policies, Coulibaly hotly disagreed. “You’re the ones who elected your governments, and the governments never hid their intentions to be at war in Mali or elsewhere.”
Police were able to pinpoint the location of the hostages by tracking data that continued to be sent by their mobile phones, which they had been ordered to place on the floor after Coulibaly came in spraying gunfire. Police also hacked into the grocery store’s CCTV cameras and were able to watch events unfolding inside.
On Saturday, one of the rescued hostages gave a dramatic account of the ordeal to Le Point newspaper, describing how a customer tried to grab one of Coulibaly’s weapons when he left it on a counter. As the man turned to fire, unfortunately, the gun jammed, leaving him helpless. Coulibaly executed him in cold blood.
Another hostage, identified only as Mickael B., told Le Point about heading for the checkout with his purchases when he heard a loud bang that he thought, at first, was a firecracker.
“But turning, I saw a black man armed with two Kalashnikov rifles and I knew what had happened.”
The hostage grabbed his 3-year-old son and fled to the back of the store. With other customers, they scrambled down the spiral staircase, taking refuge in one of two basement walkin refrigerator rooms.
“Five minutes later, a store employee was sent down by the killer. She said we were to go back up, otherwise there’d be carnage. I refused to go up.”
The employee returned. This time, Mickael B. agreed to follow her upstairs. “At the top, a man was dying in a pool of his own blood. The terrorist introduced himself to us.
“He was strangely calm. ‘I am Amedy Coulibaly, Malian and Muslim. I belong to the Islamic State.”
Among the heroes of the day was Lassany Bathily, a 24-year-old Muslim employee of the store originally from Mali who shepherded terrified customers to safety in that freezer. “When they ran down, I opened the door,” he said in a videotape released Friday. “I turned off the light and turned off the freezer. When I turned off the cold, I put (the hostages) in there. I told them to stay calm.”
Bathily is credited with hiding half a dozen customers.
Also speaking publicly for the first time Saturday was Malek Merabet, brother of Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim police officer shot and killed at point-blank range by one of the closerange Kouachis outside the Charlie Hebdo offices. “My brother was a Muslim and he was killed by people who pretend to be Muslims. They are terrorists; that’s it.”
Merabet added: “I speak now to all the racists, Islamophobes and antiSemites who confuse extremists with Muslims. Madness has neither colour nor religion.
“I want to make another point: Don’t tar everybody with the same brush. Don’t burn mosques or synagogues. You are attacking people. It won’t bring our dead back and it won’t appease the families.”
Muslims weeping for Jews, Jews grateful to Muslims.
Let that be the epitaph of this terrorist blitz.