Documents seen by Mediapart show that two of the gunmen involved in last week's bloody sieges and the Charlie Hebdo massacre were part of an organised terrorist network that was suspected of wanting to carry out “martyr operations” in France. Six of this network were at liberty on the eve of Wednesday's killings at the satirical weekly in Paris, with four of them having served prison time over a plot to spring Islamist leaders from French jails. The revelations will inevitably raise questions about whether more could have been done to prevent the three days of terror attacks, in which 12 people were murdered in the attack on the magazine, a policewoman was shot dead, and four hostages were killed in a siege at a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
Shortly after Wednesday's murderous attack the police realised they already had a case file that would help lead them to the killers. The breakthrough came after one of the two men suspected over the massacre, Saïd Kouachi, left his identity card in their abandoned getaway car – whether by accident or design (1). The name Kouachi quickly led investigators back to an anti-terrorist investigation in 2010 into a plot by a radical network to break leading Islamist figures out of French jails. What investigators found in the file allowed them to carry out searches across Paris as part of their hunt for the killers and gave them rapid insight into just who they were dealing with.
One of the figures who featured in that 2010 probe was Saïd's younger brother and accomplice in the Charlie Hebdo killings Chérif Kouachi - both men were shot dead by police on Friday. Chérif Kouachi had already been jailed back in 2008 for his part in the recruitment of young French citizens to go and fight in Iraq, and had then joined this new radical network. Another figure whose name jumped out from the 2010 investigation case files was Amedy Coulibaly, the man suspected of shooting dead a policewoman at Montrouge in Paris on Thursday, January 8th, and who was involved in the bloody hostage taking at a Jewish supermarket in east Paris on Friday January 9th, in which he killed four hostages before himself being killed by police. Coulibaly's partner Hayat Boumeddienne, who is currently still wanted by police over the killing of the policewoman, was also arrested during the 2010 probe.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Though the case against Chérif was eventually dropped in relation to the jail break plot, Coulibaly was prosecuted and convicted. On December 20th, 2013, he was jailed for five years, and is only thought to have been released late last year. So when interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve declared last Friday that “nothing pointed to the fact” that the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly “might have got involved in this kind of act” and that they had not come before the courts over such issues, he was misleading the public.
The investigation into the planned jail break of Islamist leaders – who included Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, the bomb maker involved in the wave of bombings in France in 1995 – led to jail terms for a total of eight members of Kouachi and Coulibaly's group, sentences ranging from one to 12 years. Just one of them appealed, Djamel Beghal, the central figure in the network who had been convicted in 2005 for having planned an attack against the American embassy in Paris four years earlier. He was sent to prison then put under house arrest in the Cantal département or county in south-central France. It was only in December, scarcely a month ago, that the court of appeal in Paris upheld his sentence over the prison break plot.
“No evidence and it was just religious convictions that were sentenced,” Beghal complained at the time on his blog. However, the case files seen by Mediapart in their entirety hint at the existence of an armed group who, in addition to the jail break, were even then ready to consider future “martyr operations”. Six members of the group – four of whom had served their time over the prison break plot – were free on the eve of the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Back in the spring of 2010 the anti-terrorist police had quickly grasped the dangerous nature of this network. On May 18th of that year they searched the home of Amedy Coulibaly – known as “Doly” - at Bagneux south-west of central 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.”
Coulibaly was already known to the police. Though he was on the books at the Manpower employment agency, he had already been linked to 16 cases of armed robbery, assault and drug trafficking. Yet though he was flagged as a “hard-line Islamist” in May 2010 by the police anti-terrorist unit the SDAT, Coulibaly himself played down his religious radicalism when interviewed. “I'm trying to make progress with my religion but I'm doing so slowly,” he said. At the time he described Chérif Kouachi, who then worked on a temporary basis as a fishmonger, as a “friend I met in prison”.
Questioned about his links with “jihadist veterans”, Coulibaly admitted he knew one - Djamel Beghal. Indeed, in July 2010 both Coulibaly and Kouachi were portrayed by the anti-terrorist authorities as “pupils” of Beghal. “If you want me to tell you all the terrorists I know, well there's more, I know them all: those from the Chechen networks, the Afghan networks...” Coulibaly enjoyed boasting to the police during questioning. “But just because I know them doesn't make me a terrorist.” He even claimed that he “did not agree with [terrorist] attacks … if only because I could be a victim of one”. Then appearing before a judge a few days later he insisted: “Never in my life would I take part in an attack or in something as serious as that.”
The investigation, however, revealed a very different story. Telephone taps carried out on “Doly's” phone on March and April 2010 showed, “without any ambiguity” according to the investigators, “his radical faith” and the “ideological hold” exercised on him by Djamel Beghal. Meanwhile the bomb-maker for the 1995 attacks, Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, regarded Coulibaly as a “faithful and determined” militant. “What's more, he's comfortable with his religion, he's part of it … he's serious about his religion,” said the Islamist terrorist during an intercepted telephone conversation on a mobile phone that was being used clandestinely in prison.
An analysis of Coulibaly's laptop also contained photos showing him posing in front of a black Islamist flag. In other photos he can be seen in a forest armed with a crossbow and next to his partner, who is wearing a full veil. In the middle of the many photos bearing witness to his faith, investigators also found various child pornography images, of which they also found a large number on Chérif Kouachi's computer.
At the time Kouachi and Coulibaly were already cogs in a well-oiled machine. “Djamel Beghal is the head of an operational cell with allegiance to 'Tafkir' [editor's note, Takfir wal-Hijra was a radical group founded in Egypt and which encouraged the use of 'sleeper cells'],” according to a senior SDAT officer in a report on May 21st, 2010. “Formed around leaders who belonged to the takfir movement, the members of the terrorist network revealed by the investigation are, in most cases, serial offenders who converted to Islam during their time in prison.” The officer also wrote of “the development of a terrorist plot of which the aim was to bring about the escape of imprisoned brothers and which would culminate in the carrying out of a larger-scale act.”
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1. There has some speculation on social media in France about why Saïd Kouachi's French identity card was left in the getaway car as he and his brother Chérif fled from the scene of the massacre on Wednesday January 7th. Some have suggested that it was left deliberately as a 'calling card', to claim responsibility for the murders. Others speculate that it was a way of Kouachi showing that he had in effect abandoned his French nationality. However the most likely explanation is that it simply fell out in the confusion and drama of the escape.
'I have come to bring you carnage'
The first stage of the plot consisted of organising the escapes of Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, who the SDAT identified as the head of the group, and another militant Islamist who were both held in Clairvaux prison in the north-east Champagne region, and also the escape of Djamel Beghal, who was under house arrest in the village of Murat, in the Cantal in south-central France. The SDAT report said the ultimate aim was to mount “a terrorist action of great size”. That much was clear from a phone conversation between Belkacem and Beghal at 12.22 p.m. on April 22nd 2010, and which was tapped by police. “Me, I’ve got two things which I've thought about since a long time ago,” Beghal is recorded as telling Belkacem. “One thing that I prepare, stone by stone, for years, so as to be able to have a good go afterwards. As the saying goes, ‘because one strike of a pickaxe is worth ten strikes of a hoe’. It requires time, because it’s not a joke. It’s not a game.”
In an intercepted letter, another member of the group, Fouad Bassim, wrote to an accomplice saying: “Do what’s necessary to help me get out, and this time there will be no pity outside.” Bassim remains on the run after he was sentenced in 2013 to eight years in prison.
A major mystery of this 2010 case remains the discovery in Belkacem’s prison cell of instructions on how to make poison, and notably cyanide extracted from apple seeds. Delivering judgment, the Paris court summed up the conclusions of an expert toxicologist assigned to assist the case who confirmed “the efficiency of the operating method explained in the instructions as well as the potentially lethal character of the obtained product.”
“The most fearsome [thing],” the judgement also read, “would be to contaminate a water supply network or food processing circuit with this liquid, which could make a large number of individuals ill.”
However, the investigators were not able to find corroborating evidence of a concrete plot to use this poison. On the other hand, the network spared no effort in buying weapons in Belgium and actively preparing the escape of the Islamist leaders. A message was found from one member of the group, who wrote to an accomplice: “We need two Kalashs [Kalashnikov rifles], of two calibres, ten grenades. Try to do things as quickly as possible, because we need them. It’s for you to talk to the brother who sells arms. My brother doesn’t know anything, so try and negotiate a low price.”
Even though the authorities ultimately dropped the case against Chérif Kouachi over the jail break plot – it was considered there were “not enough facts showing his involvement” - during the course of the investigation he was revealed to be an active member of the network. Closely monitored by the police in April 2010, he went to visit Djamel Beghal in the Cantal for a week, accompanied by two other Islamists who had already been convicted over terrorist acts.
Questioned 11 times by police in May 2010, Kouachi remained resolutely silent. “The person in question keeps silence and stares at the ground,” a SDAT report on one session of questioning notes. One of the SDAT investigators is recorded as asking Kouachi: “Are you conscious of the fact that your refusal to enter into any dialogue with us, including about the most anodyne of things, the refusal to make out a page of writing, the refusal to look at photos that are presented to you, the refusal to take food, is the typical and habitual behaviour that is witnessed with individuals who are strongly indoctrinated and who belong to a structured organisation and who have had the benefit of the procedures to follow when detained for questioning?”
Kouachi's own computer files were more revealing. Many writings – most of them anonymous – found on his computer or USB storage stick pointed to a structured enrolment into jihadist thinking. For the most part they were texts on martyr operations and correct behaviour. They were all downloaded in 2009.
Enlargement : Illustration 5
One of the documents, called ‘Sacrifice Operations’, describes an operational method that has similarities with what would place on January 7th 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. “A mujahid breaks into the enemy’s barracks or a grouping zone and fires at point blank range without having prepared an escape plan and neither having thought of escape. The objective is to kill as many enemies as possible. The [mujahid] will very probably die.”
The document suggests that suicide-attacks are the most fearsome. “The term ‘suicide attack’ which some people use is not exact,” it reads. “It is the Jews who chose this term so as to dissuade people from doing it […] As for the effects of these operations upon the enemy, we have seen that, in our experience, no other technique produced as much terror nor shook the mind as much.”
Another document found was one entitled ‘The Prophet of Terror’, which began: “I have come to bring you carnage”. Dressed in religious references, the text is in fact an appeal for terrorism. “The Koran speaks of preparing oneself the best one can to terrorise the enemy,” it reads, and also talks of “horrifying the enemy”.
Chérif Kouachi also had a work written by Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, the spiritual leader of the Jordanian Salafist jihadist movement and once a mentor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). It addresses militant Islamists with “a series of points of advice on security and prevention”, of which one example is: “It is not, in most circumstances, indispensable for a funder to know when and where the operation will be carried out, nor by whose hands. In the same manner, concerning those who will execute the final stage of the operation, it is not indispensable for them to know who finances the cell or group.”
There was no document found among Chérif Kouachi’s belongings in 2010 that referred to the publication of sketches of the Prophet Muhammad by Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten in 2005, and which were subsequently published in France in 2006 by Charlie Hebdo. However, there was a lengthy document, entitled ‘Deviances and incoherencies among the preachers of decadence’, which referred to the “fully justified” fatwa issued against the British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie. It also refers to controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq who it describes as a “human wreck” who “permits himself in one of his rags to say that the stupidest religion is Islam”. The text also attacks journalists as “dishonest scribblers” and claims that “in disbelieving societies, sin is the law and blasphemy a sadistic entertainment”.
The 2010 investigation of the Beghal cell clearly showed that its members were ready to move on to mounting an attack. A man called Teddy Valcy, known as 'Djamil', who was close to Kouachi and Coulibaly, had been arrested while in possession of a Kalashnikov with a magazine containing 22 rounds. “This weapon belongs to me and I would not have hesitated to use it against you if I had had the time,” Valcy is recorded as telling police officers at the time of his arrest.
In a video recording on his mobile phone made in April 2010, Valcy appears wearing a traditional North African djellaba robe and holding a machine gun on his shoulder. “The time has come when we must take action,” he says in the recording. “The Muslim community is in danger […] the dignity of Muslims is flouted. We have no other solutions than to take up arms to defend our community. I urge you to take up arms as fast as possible, with a very great determination, and don’t forget the reward for the martyr [...] We are called terrorists but the word is weak because we must really terrorise them any more, the enemies, the infidels. There is no discussion with them.” On January 7th, 8th and 9th, part of the Beghal network answered the call.
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- The French version of the story can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse and Michael Streeter