Escape to Syria
Fiend’s wife bolted
She won’t show her burqa in France anytime soon.
Hayat Boumeddiene escaped to Syria the day before her commonlaw husband killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket on the eastern edge of Paris, it was reported Saturday.
Boumeddiene, 26, hopped a plane from Madrid to Istanbul on Jan. 2 with a man whose brother is known to French intelligence, reported Le Parisien, a newspaper in France’s capital.
Turkish intelligence reported that she crossed the border to Syria on Thursday, Le Parisien reported. She had a return ticket from Istanbul to Madrid for Friday but did not use it.
Boumeddiene, suspected of aiding husband Amedy Coulibaly’s attack on the Hyper Cacher market in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood, was questioned by antiterror police in 2010.
She described how she and Coulibaly visited Djamel Beghal, a radical Muslim who lives in central France. Beghal’s teachings are thought to have inspired Friday’s deadly attacks on the market and on the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charle Hebdo.
“I know that Ahmedy met him in prison,” Boumeddiene had said, according to a story in Le Nouvel Observateur, a newsmagazine.
Boumeddiene refused to denounce al Qaeda in the police interview and instead talked of “the innocents killed by the Americans.”
She and Coulibaly, who was killed in the kosher market standoff, were married religiously but apparently not civilly.
Boumeddienne is believed to have participated in at least 500 phone calls with the wife of Cherif Kouachi, one of the two shooters in the Charlie Hebdo attack, Paris prosecutors say.
Meanwhile, French detectives are trying to determine whether Coulibaly shot a 32yearold jogger Wednesday evening.
The jogger was in critical condition after being shot in the back and arm in Fon-tenay-aux-Roses, the Paris suburb where Coulibaly lived, media reports said.