When French police searched the black Citroen car crashed and abandoned by the two men suspected of having carried out the killings at Charlie Hebdo magazine on Wednesday, they made an instant breakthrough.
An ID card left behind in the attackers’ car – the result of a hurried and unplanned change of vehicle, police claim – pointed them towards 32-year-old Chérif Kouachi and his brother Said (34). Within hours, police commandos were raiding addresses in the northern Parisian suburbs and in Reims, a city about 130km northeast of the capital. Seven of the men’s associates were arrested.
Describing the brothers as “armed and dangerous”, the authorities publicly identified them as prime suspects and issued a nationwide alert under their names. The possibility that they could carry out further attacks was “our main concern”, said Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
Both men had appeared on the authorities’ radar before, but the file on Chérif was particularly detailed.
Radical Islam
An orphan of parents of Algerian origin, he was born and raised in Paris, where he qualified as a sports instructor and worked as a pizza delivery driver. He was involved in petty crime but turned towards radical Islam in his early 20s.
Sometimes going by the name Abou Issen, Chérif became part of the so-called "Buttes-Chaumont network" (named after the park where members would jog together in northern Paris) that helped send would-be jihadis to join al-Qaeda in Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003. He was prosecuted for his involvement in the network and, in 2008, was given an 18-month suspended sentence.
Chérif married his partner, a creche worker, in 2008, but otherwise Said is his only family.
Records from the “Buttes-Chaumont” trial suggest Chérif’s turn towards radical Islam can be traced to 2003, when he began attending the Adda’wa mosque, near Stalingrad in the 10th arrondissement.
The mosque was demolished in 2006 but plans to replace it with the second-largest mosque in Paris have stalled due to a lack of funds; a vacant building site is all that remains. In the local cafes and boulangeries, locals could not recall Chérif but told The Irish Times the mosque was known for its radical preachers.
"Everyone knew it was being very closely watched by the intelligence services," said Raoult, who runs an agricultural machinery shop across the road from where the mosque once stood. At Adda'wa, Chérif met the future head of the Iraqi network, Farid Benyettou, who was also in his 20s. They took religious instruction together, and his behaviour quickly changed. Lawyers acting for him during his 2008 trial said he was not an observant Muslim, and had "smoked hash, drunk, and had a girlfriend" before becoming involved with the group. "Before, I was a delinquent. But, after, I felt great. I didn't even imagine that I could die," he told the court.
“It was everything I was seeing on television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison [in Iraq], all that, which motivated me,” said another member of the group.
The court was told that as the date of Chérif’s own departure to Iraq approached, his concerns grew. Despite his anxiety, he joined the others to train in the park.
Investigators believed the network sent about a dozen French men to Iraq via Syria between 2003 and 2005, but Chérif wasn’t among them. He was arrested in Paris on the eve of his departure in January 2005.
Two years later, his name was cited in a police report related to the attempted prison escape of Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, a former member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which carried out a series of bombings in France in the 1990s.
Belkacem was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002 for a bombing at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris in October 1995 that left 30 injured.
Militant training
Chérif was also suspected of being close to another French jihadi,
Djamel Beghal
, who spent 10 years in prison for planning attacks. They were suspected of participating in militant training programmes together, although charges in this case were dropped against Chérif.
On his release from prison in 2006, Chérif Kouachi worked at the fish counter at a supermarket in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Details of his activities since then – and of the extent of the authorities’ knowledge about them – have yet to emerge.
