Cathedral city that spawned a jihadi killer
AFEW minutes’ walk from the historic centre of Chartres is the district of Madeleine. There you will find the former family home of Omar Ismail Mostefai who – I was told by one former acquaintance – attended the town’s Jean Moulin College, named after a World War II freedom fighter who gave his life for France.
Yet Mostefai’s place in his national history will be very different from that of Moulin, an icon of integrity and courage. The 29-year-old was one of the squad of IS suicide bomber gunmen which attacked the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris.
Mostefai was only identified through the prints on his severed fingertip, found in the Bataclan charnel house. The police held his records because of the spate of minor offending he had committed as a teenage hoodlum in Chartres and elsewhere during a fractured childhood and youth.
But why would a young man from the exquisite cathedral city of Chartres, of all places – rather than the Parisian suburban ghettoes known as the banlieue – be driven to commit such evil? (It was also reported yesterday that his last known address here was close to the home of another French Muslim who was killed in June fighting alongside fellow jihadists in Syria.)
What we now know of Mostefai’s story goes to the very heart of the agony that liberal France and the rest of Europe now faces. How have so many young, nativeborn Muslims become so alienated and then radicalised to the point of mass murder?
Chartres is a little jewel. It lies some 55 miles south-west of Paris, connected by a motorway along which the digital signs yesterday read ‘Solidarity with the victims’ rather than mundane detail of traffic delays. The old city’s streets twist and climb towards the magnificent Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame, where on the altar steps a notice now reads: ‘Lord, welcome your people who died in Paris. Pray for peace and unity.’ But peace and unity are all too precious commodities these days.
What I was told yesterday is that dialogue between the cathedral and the authorities at the mosque in the nearby suburb of Luce has not always flowed freely. The mosque has a reputation locally for long-standing links to radical Islamic figures and doctrine. According to cathedral administrator Gilles Fresson, previous imams at Luce had simply ignored the cathedral’s invitations to closer contact. That froideur has apparently lessened under the current mosque leadership, which claims not to embrace extremism.
Omar Mostefai is said to have attended the Luce mosque. He was born and spent his formative years in Courcouronnes, a satellite town south-east of the French capital. His parents were Algerian immigrants and at some stage in Mostefai’s youth they moved to the fringes of Chartres.
Mostefai expressed his disaffection with the hand that life had dealt him through petty crime and rap videos he made with friends. Then, almost overnight – one old friend said yesterday – the young man who had worked in a bakery and fathered two children by a girlfriend changed from tearaway to deeply religious introvert. Mostefai’s path to the Bataclan concert hall had begun.
Yesterday’s driving rain did nothing to lighten the mood in the suburb in which Mostefai had found an unsatisfactory home; few were prepared to talk about the future jihadi mass murderer in their midst. The mosque was closed.
But then in a small tailoring and repair workshop I found Freddy.
Freddy came to France in 1980 from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Integration was easier then, he shrugged. ‘But life is still tough everywhere in France if your skin is dark,’ he said. ‘You have to fight hard whether you live in the banlieue or Chartres.’
Freddy said that he came to know Mostefai because the youth was the same age as his own children. ‘He was quiet, but got into some trouble as a teenager. Simply had the wrong friends.
‘I recall he was a good footballer, but when he got into too much trouble, small robberies, driving without licence and stuff like that, the club kicked him out.
‘His parents had divorced by then and instead of moving in with one of them, the boy went to live with friends, sleeping on floors and sofas.’
FREDDY was sure, he said, that Mostefai had briefly attended the Jean Moulin College, which would not comment on the matter last night. Freddy lost track of Mostefai after the young man’s family fell apart and his life spiralled downwards. Then the name came back into his life this week like a thunderbolt. ‘It was a terrible shock. It makes my heart ache to see what he did.’
How could the young footballer he knew become the IS kamikaze? ‘Everyone knows that the mosque at Luce has had some very radical imams. Even though one of the most fanatical was expelled, the replacements were still pretty tough. Radicalisation happens when you meet bad people at a bad time in your life.’