Extensive surveillance by the French security services of Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the two brothers who carried out the shooting massacre at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine last Wednesday, was halted last summer because no clear evidence was found of their involvement with a terrorist group or plot, Mediapart has learnt.
Meanwhile, Amedy Coulibaly, the third terrorist who took part in the attacks in and around Paris last week in which 17 victims died, was the object of no surveillance after he left prison in March last year despite having served time for his involvment in an Islamist jail-break plot. Coulibaly last week shot and killed a policewoman before taking shoppers and staff hostage on Friday in a kosher supermarket in the south-east of Paris, shooting dead four of his captives.
Both Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers were killed when police and gendarmerie commandos stormed their separate sieges in and close to Paris late Friday afternoon. The attacks between January 7th and 9th were the deadliest in France since 50 years.
In all, betweeen 2011 and 2014, the movements of Saïd Kouachi, 34, were monitored for a total of four months, while phone conversations of Chérif Kouachi, 32, were tapped for a total of two years during the same period.
The two brothers were well-known to French intelligence, police and justice services for their involvement with Islamist extremists. In 2008, Chérif Kouachi was given a three-year prison sentence, with 18 months suspended, for his involvement in a jihadist recruitment network which, between 2003 and 2005, sent volunteers to join al-Qaeda in Iraq. Two years later, both men were implicated in the plot to spring from jail Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, former member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), for which Coulibaly was jailed.
Belkacem was serving a life sentence for his bomb-making role in a series of attacks in Paris in 1995 which left eight people dead. The case against the Kouachi brothers in the jail-break plot was eventually dropped for lack of evidence.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In October 2011, US intelligence services informed their French counterparts that a member of the terrorist organisation Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which had been based in the Yemen since 2006, had been in contact via the internet with a person situated in a cybercafé in Gennevilliers, a Paris suburb situated west of the capital. At the time, Chérif Kouachi lived in Gennevilliers, at number 17 rue Basly. However, there has never been conclusive evidence that Kouachi was the person contacted by the terrorist group.
Then, one month later, in November 2011, US intelligence passed on information to the French of a journey made by Saïd Kouachi and another person, between July 25th and August 15th 2011, when they were recorded as definitely having stayed in Oman and were suspected of having made a clandestine trip to neighbouring Yemen. “This information was neither confirmed by physical nor technical sources,” said a French source, whose name is withheld, and who was close to the investigations into the Kouachi’s Yemeni connections.
However, the US tip-off prompted the French domestic intelligence organisation, the Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (DCRI) – since enlarged and re-named the DGSI –to launch an surveillance operation. Because of the nature of the DCRI, this did not require the involvement of a magistrate, as it would in the case of a police operation. Beginning in December 2011, and up until December 2013, Chérif Kouachi’s movements and phone conversations were monitored by the DCRI.
The surveillance found that Kouachi appeared to be gradually distancing himself from terrorist-linked contacts, although maintaining his relations with a number of figures known to be members of radical Islamic movements. It also found that he had become involved in a relatively less dangerous criminal activity, which was that of importing from China counterfeit clothing and footwear. The phone taps recorded him speaking about the racket.
Meanwhile, Chérif’s elder brother Saïd also interested the DCRI. According to information obtained by Mediapart, his phone conversations were monitored over a period of eight months during 2012, when he was also the object of four months of physical surveillance. In 2013, his phone was again monitored for a total of two months. The surveillance was temporarily ended after it failed to offer clear evidence of him representing a terrorist threat.
However, in February 2014 French intelligence services obtained confirmation from a credible witness that Saïd Kouachi had, as US intelligence first revealed three years earlier, travelled to Oman in 2011, although there remained uncertainty about his possible trip to Yemen. Subsequently, he was again the target of phone surveillance, lasting five months until June 2014, during which time no evidence was found of him involved in terrorist activity or plots.
From that point, the Kouachi brothers disappeared off the radar of the French anti-terrorist services who concluded there were no grounds to open a full-blown judicial investigation into the pair. That conclusion was echoed last week by interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve who, speaking on January 9th, the day the brothers were killed by gendarmerie forces, said “nothing signified the fact that they could be engaged in action of this type,” underlining that “their situation” had not been judged to warrant a judicial probe.
Numerous questions remain. Were the brothers a sleeper cell, clever enough to have deliberately fooled French intelligence services into believing they no longer represented an active threat, perhaps using a secure communications method such as by internet? Or did they temporarily turn their back on terror movements?
Coulibaly, the third killer who escaped surveillance
Today, with the benefit of hindsight, it appears that of the two brothers, Saïd was the more skillful in dissimulating his terrorist connections. It was Saïd Kouachi who introduced his younger brother into the circle of contacts surrounding Farid Benyettou (1), the central figure of a Paris-based network of jihadist recruitment that sent volunteers to fight with al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was uncovered and dismantled by French anti-terrorist services in 2005. But, according to a source close to the judicial investigation into the network and whose name is withheld, Saïd, during subsequent questioning by police, denounced his brother’s wayward drift towards extremist groups.
But it is the case of Amedy Coulibaly, 32, the third terrorist involved in last week’s horror attacks, who carried out the hostage-taking in a kosher supermarket on the south-east tip of Paris on Friday, murdering four people, and who the day before shot dead a policewoman, which is potentially the most embarrassing for the French intelligence services. Unlike the Kouachi brothers, Coulibaly was never identified as a possible threat since leaving prison in February last year.
On December 20th 2013, Coulibaly, who went by the nickname ‘Doly’, was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the plot to spring from jail Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, the bomb maker involved in a wave of bombings in France in 1995. He was released from prison in February 2014, benefiting from a reduction of his jail term due to the three years of preventive detention he served before his trial, and a law that allows some prisoners to be released early from jail on conditional discharge and the wearing of an electronic tag. In Coulibaly’s case, he wore a tag until May 2014, after which he was free of any restrictions. It is not known whether news of his release was passed on to the intelligence services, who subsequently mounted no surveillance of Coulibaly.
In a video in which he appears and which was released on the internet after he was killed when police stormed the besieged kosher supermarket on Friday, Coulibaly claims to have “moved a lot” following his release from prison last year, and to have “criss-crossed the mosques of France a little bit, and lots in the Paris region”.
The 2010 investigation into his involvement in the jail-break plot revealed a dangerous personality who had been involved in several armed robberies before his contact with Islamic extremists in prison. A report in May 2010 by the anti-terrorist police agency, the SDAT, flagged Coulibaly as “a hard-line Islamist”. Phone taps at that time revealed him to be clearly under the influence of Djamel Beghal, convicted in 2005 for having planned an attack against the American embassy in Paris four years earlier and who was the leader of a cell allied to the sectarian Salafist group Takfir wal-Hijra , a radical group founded in Egypt and which encouraged the use of 'sleeper cells'.
The phone taps showed Beghal was so influential in Coulibaly’s life that he prevented Coulibaly from voting in elections because it was considered to be a sin to do so, one that was “worse than the major sins”. Beghal also convinced Coulibaly to provide money to a man described as a former Islamist combatant in Afghanistan who, Beghal said, “has done quite a bit of jihad and everything that follows”.
On May 18th 2010, officers from the SDAT searched Coulibaly’s home in Bagneux, a suburb south-west of Paris, and found 240 rounds of 7.62 calibre ammunition hidden in a paint bucket, as well as a revolver holster in a cupboard. “They belong to me,” Coulibaly said of the bullets. “They're bullets for a Kalash [Kalashnikov]. I'm looking to sell them on the street.”
Following the terror attacks last week, police investigators raided an apartment Coulibaly had taken as a short-term rental until January 11th in Gentilly, a suburb south-east of Paris, but which was not his home. There they found a cache of weapons, including automatic rifles and detonators. After the siege of the kosher supermarket was ended on Friday, it was discovered that Coulibaly had booby-trapped the store with grenades and explosives which fortunately was not triggered when police stormed the building.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
The Kouachi brothers were also heavily armed. During their three-day rampage last week, beginning with the massacre on Wednesday of 11 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices and the slaughter of a policeman shortly after, they were in possession of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher as well as Kalashnikov rifles. The grenade launcher can be seen slung over the back of Chérif Kouachi in CCTV footage of them inside a petrol station situated near Crépy-en-Valois, 60 kilometres north-east of Paris, which they robbed of food and fuel on the morning of Thursday, January 8th.
In the stolen car they used for the attack on Charlie Hebdo, which they abandoned in northern Paris shortly after the massacre, police found equipment for making about ten Molotov cocktails, handcuffs, jihadist flags, and a Go-Pro miniature camera of the same type used by Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah to film his murderous attack on the Ozar-Hatorah Jewish school.
It remains unclear whether the three terrorists communicated between each other during the January 7th-9th outrages because no mobile phones belonging to them have been found.
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1: French daily Le Parisien on Sunday revealed that Farid Benyettou, now 33, who in 2008 was given a six-year prison sentence for his role in the jihadist recruitment network, was last week working as a trainee- nurse at the Paris hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière where some victims of the January 7th-9th terrorist attacks were admitted. Benyettou was reportedly suspended from duty at the hospital after his management discovered, on the evening of January 7th, the link with Chérif Kouachi , just hours after the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Benyettou, who was reportedly off-duty last week until the weekend, had not apparently declared his criminal past which would otherwise have prevented him from exercising as a nurse in a French public hospital.
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse.