France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, warned on Tuesday that the country was still under threat from accomplices of the gunmen who terrorised Paris last week and from global terrorist networks, reports The Guardian.
Valls, addressing a special session of the French parliament in memory of the victims, said that “very great and very serious risks remain”, as the manhunt for suspected accomplices to last week’s attacks widened. It emerged that an associate of one of the gunmen had been arrested in Bulgaria a few days earlier, allegedly on the way to join Islamic State (Isis) jihadists in Syria.
Investigators are looking into the possibility that a jogger wounded on Wednesday, at the onset of last week’s bloodshed in Paris, may have been the victim of an unknown fourth gunman. And the police are still looking for an accomplice who filmed, edited and posted online a video of one of the killers justifying his actions.
The man who escorted the partner of another of the gunmen as she fled to Syria last week was revealed to have connections to a separate network helping volunteer jihadists travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“The global threat is still present. Serious and very high risks remain, those linked to possible accomplices, or those coming from networks, terrorists who give orders, or cyberattacks,” Valls said.
“I owe you the truth,” he told the national assembly. “To confront them, soldiers, police and gendarmes have been mobilised.”
Valls promised “exceptional measures” and an “implacable response”.
The picture emerging from the investigation so far is that the killers were drawn from an underground jihadist culture made up of overlapping circles of acquaintances, often former prison friends, with loose affiliations to al-Qaida and Isis.
The man detained in Bulgaria, Fritz-Joly Joachin, is a 29-year old Haitian-Frenchman who was stopped at a border checkpoint as he tried to cross into Turkey in the early hours of New Year’s Day. His ex-wife had alleged he had abducted their three year-old son and was taking him to Syria to be brought up by Isis jihadists, a charge Joachin has denied.
Darina Slavova, a Bulgarian prosecutor in the border town of Haskovo, told the Reuters news agency that a second arrest warrant alleges Joachin had been in contact with Chérif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who killed 12 people in a gun attack on the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday. Slavova did not make clear the nature of the alleged contacts and Joachin denied any wrongdoing.
“I have friends but if they have committed crimes I cannot be held responsible for that,” he told a Bulgarian judge on Tuesday.
New video footage emerged on Tuesday showing Chérif Kouachi and his brother Saïd calming reloading their rifles in the street moment after the Charlie Hebdo murders, and shouting: “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed. We have killed Charlie Hebdo”, before driving off in a small black car. The video, posted online by Sky News, shows the car drive up to an approaching police vehicle on a narrow road and the brothers opening fire, forcing the police car to reverse rapidly back up the street.
More details emerged on Tuesday of another suspected accomplice, Mehdi Belhouchine. The 23-year-old bearded Frenchman was pictured at immigration at Istanbul airport on January 2nd accompanying Hayat Boumeddiene, named as a wanted fugitive after the attacks. Boumeddiene was the partner of another of the gunmen, Amedy Coulibaly, who shot dead a trainee Paris policewoman last Thursday before taking hostages in a kosher supermarket on the eastern rim of Paris, and killing four of them before being shot by police on Friday night.
Le Monde reported that Belhouchine was known to the French police as his elder brother, Mohamed, was sentenced to two years in prison in July last year for his part in a network involved in the channelling of French volunteer jihadists to fight in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mohamed Belhouchine was said to have shown recent combat videos from the region to the recruits in a Paris flat. Mehdi Belhouchine came along with his brother, witnesses said, but only played computer games while the jihadist videos were being shown.
It is unclear whether Belhouchine was simply acting as an escort for Boumeddiene or also had links to her partner Coulibaly.
President Francois Hollande suggested for the first time on Tuesday that when Coulibaly shot a 26 year-old policewoman in the back in the district of Montrouge last Thursday, he could have been on his way to attack a Jewish school only 100 yards away, but was forced to flee.
Read more of this report from The Guardian.
See also:
How the Paris terrorists slipped off intelligence radar
Charlie Hebdo killings: did intelligence services overlook threat from terror network?
Charlie Hebdo suspects killed in firefight as sieges end in bloodshed
After the mass marches in France – what comes next?
France terror attacks prompt historic mass protest marches
Charlie Hebdo suspects killed in firefight as sieges end in bloodshed
Charlie Hebdo massacre: the dilemma for French Muslims
Charlie Hebdo killings: an assault on our freedoms
Gunmen kill 12 at Paris office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo
The bitter background to the Charlie Hebdo massacre
'Not afraid': Parisians gather with a defiant message after Charlie Hebdo killings