Terror links of men who brought France to a standstill
THE extremist l i nks of the gunmen who brought carnage to Paris reads like a Who’s Who of modern Islamic terrorism.
The Kouachi brothers’ sprawling network took them from a street-level jihadi recruitment cell to the Yemen stronghold of one of the world’s most hated Al Qaeda figures. Along the way, they met Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed by police yesterday after taking hostages in a Jewish supermarket.
The trio were disciples of hate preachers with links on both sides of the English Channel going back more than a decade. Among them is a dangerous fundamentalist who served as a key lieutenant of Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada at Finsbury Park Mosque.
Leaving the blood-soaked offices of Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, one of the gunmen told a witness that they represented Al Qaeda in Yemen. But last night there was growing evidence of links to the militants of Islamic State, who have posted gloating messages online.
The journey to radical Islam for orphan brothers Cherif and Said began when they met Paris janitorturned-hate preacher Farid Benyettou in the early 2000s.
They became committed members of his Buttes-Chaumont jihadi recruitment cell, which sent at least a dozen young men to fight in Iraq. The group was named after a hilly park in the French capital’s 19th arrondissement where young extremists met and trained.
It was there that the brothers met Coulibaly, who declared his intention to ‘die on behalf of Buttes- Chaumont’ hours before armed police ended his siege yesterday.
All three men were mentored by Djamel Beghal, 49, once a trusted henchman for Hamza and Qatada when they controlled the Finsbury mosque.
Beghal, who was jailed for ten years for plotting to bomb the US embassy in Paris, once met Osama bin Laden as he recruited British jihadis to fight in Afghanistan.
He is also said to have recruited shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the ‘ 20th hijacker’ in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Cherif Kouachi spent time with Beghal in prison while serving a three-year sentence for attempting to send jihadi fighters to Iraq. The pair were photographed playing football together and, after being freed, Cherif visited Beghal in Murat, central France, in April 2010.
Coulibaly was also radicalised by Beghal and admitted to police he saw him every three weeks, but purely for ‘religious instruction’. Former MI5 informant Reda Hassaine described Beghal as a ‘ constant presence’ at Finsbury Park Mosque in the late 1990s. Mr Hassaine said: ‘What happened in Paris was the legacy of Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza.’
The two brothers and Coulibaly were also linked to a failed attempt to spring terrorist Smain Ali Belkacem from prison. Belkacem, a leading member of the Algerian terrorist group GIA, was serving a life sentence for the bombing of a Paris railway station in 1995.
Despite all of these warning signs, Said Kouachi was free to travel to Yemen in 2011 where he met top Al Qaeda hate preacher Anwar al Awlaki. A senior intelligence source said he travelled to the country with several other foreign fighters and spent ‘several months’ there.
Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in September of that year, is one of the most influential Islamist figures of modern times. His videos and audio sermons remain a grim inspiration for Islamists in all corners of the world.
It was revealed last night that Britain had identified the Kouachi brothers as potential threats in 2008 and placed them on a no-fly list. The US placed the brothers on their list at the same time as the UK – raising further questions over why they were not monitored more closely by the French.
Last night there was growing evidence that Islamic State could also be linked to the Paris atrocities. One connection is the French-Tunisian jihadi Boubaker al-Hakim who was part of the Butte-Chaumont network alongside the Kouachi brothers. He claimed responsibility last month for assassinating two politicians in Tunisia in 2013.
Suspicions were heightened by a mysterious tweet by one IS jihadi 24 hours before the Charlie Hebdo attact. Reading simply: ‘Snail-eating people’, it was followed by ‘you heard it here first #snaileaters ate lead’ within hours of the massacre.