DRAMATIC NEW PICTURES AND REPORTS FROM FRANCE
...and husband’s bloody journey from Finsbury Park mentor to death at deli
‘They were known as devoutly religious’
WEARING a skimpy bikini as she embraces her muscular boyfriend, she looks like any other attractive young beachgoer on the French Riviera.
But the once-glamorous Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, is now the most wanted female terrorist suspect in the world. She is reported to have fled to Syria before her 32-year-old husband Amedy Coulibaly – the smiling young man in the picture – murdered four Jews in a Paris deli.
There were suggestions yesterday that Boumeddiene had helped her husband, along with fellow terrorists Said and Cherif Kouachi, compile an arsenal of weapons which Paris prosecutors said included two Russian-made Tokarev machine pistols, commercial explosives and hunting knives.
It is thought that the firearms were smuggled from the Balkans into Europe, and then into France by car – something a single woman is likely to have been able to get away with far easier than men.
As detectives try to learn more about the group responsible for France’s worst terrorist outrage this century, they know that piecing together Boumeddiene’s transformation from a relaxed young woman into a terrorist training with a crossbow will be essential. The former supermarket cashier is said to have been radicalised by the man she would go on to marry in an Islamic, rather than civil, ceremony.
Like her husband, Boumeddiene was born into a large family of seven children, but when she was just six her mother died.
She is from an Algerian background and family members altered their surname to ‘make it sound more French’, according to an investigating source.
Estranged from her father, Bou- meddiene ended up in care, relying on social workers to bring her up.
She was in her early 20s when she met Coulibaly in Juvisy, the rundown Paris suburb where he was brought up. Questioned by police at his home in Nanterre, another Paris suburb, Boumeddiene’s father yesterday said he was ‘shocked and horrified’ to learn his daughter was involved with a terrorist cell.
She told police who interviewed her in 2010 as part of their inquiries into Coulibaly’s dealings with Islamic extremists that she had walked away from a low-paid job as a cashier in 2009 and began wearing an Islamic veil, the kind that is now illegal in France.
Boumeddiene said that she was inspired by her husband and the radicals she lived with to ‘read a lot of books on religion, and because of this I came to ask questions on religion’.
She added: ‘When I saw the massacre of the innocents in Palestine, in Iraq, in Chechnya, in Afghanistan or anywhere the Americans sent their bombers, all that… well, who are the terrorists?’
She said that when Americans killed innocents, it was the right of men to defend their women and children – one of the reasons she said she started weapons training. Along with Coulibaly, she was pictured in 2010 visiting a convicted Al Qaeda terrorist, mentor Djamel Beghal – who was radicalised at the Finsbury Park mosque in North London – while he was under house arrest in Murat, Central France.
When police questioned her and said they knew she and Coulibaly had visited Beghal at the same time as Cherif Kouachi and two other convicted terrorists – jihadi recruiter Ahmed Laidouni and Farid Melouk of the Armed Islamic State terror group – she replied: ‘We went there for crossbow practice.’
Until recently the couple lived in Bagneux, a suburb of Paris where they were known as a devoutly religious, despite Coulibaly’s regular run-ins with the law.
To neighbours, the pair were quiet and respectful. But while Boumeddiene had no criminal record, Coulibaly has a long history of both petty and serious crimes.
The only boy of a family of ten in
Juvisy, he first came to police attention as a 17-year-old. Convictions for theft and drug offences followed and he was arrested for an attempted armed robbery on a bank in Orleans in September 2002.
Boumeddiene, who was never seen in public without her veil, waited four years for Coulibaly to come out of jail after his conviction for armed robbery.
She met the younger of the Kouachi brothers, Cherif, at a time when the pair were linked with a jihadist recruitment ring that sent fighters to Iraq. Cherif was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to three years in jail, with 18 months suspended, for his association with the underground organisation. He had wanted to fly to Iraq via Syria and was found with a manual for a Kalashnikov – the automatic weapon used in last week’s outrages.