Paris terrorist attacks

Responsibility for the suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena on Monday night, in which 22 people were killed and another 52 were injured, has been claimed by the Islamic State group. One of the Belgium-based IS cell that carried out the November 2015 attacks in Paris and the March 2016 bombings in Brussels travelled to Britain in July 2015, where he visited and photographed locations in Birmingham and Manchester, including a railway station and the Manchester United stadium Old Trafford. Matthieu Suc reports.

The terrorist attacks in Paris last year were back in the headlines this weekend after the arrest in Belgium of Salah Abdeslam, wanted for his part in the November 13th shooting and bombing massacres in the French capital. Those attacks, like the shootings carried out at Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Paris kosher store in January 2015 demonstrate the ease with which terrorists can acquire reactivated weapons, notably from Eastern Europe. In partnership with eight other European media organisations grouped in a collective project, European Investigative Collaborations, Mediapart exposes here how the European Union has turned a blind eye to the trafficking of improperly deactivated military weapons, as illustrated by the history of one such weapon used to murderous effect in Paris. Fabrice Arfi, Karl Laske and Matthieu Suc report.

In December 2008, freelance journalist Warda Mohamed interviewed a 26-year-old convicted delinquent who hid his identity behind the pseudonym ‘Hugo’. The interview centred on the repeat offender’s experiences in prison, where he served time for crimes including armed robbery and drugs trafficking. Little more than six years later, Mohamed discovered that ‘Hugo’ was in fact Amedy Coulibaly, who shot dead a policewoman and four customers of a kosher store during the January 2015 Islamist terrorist massacres in Paris. Here Mohamed returns to that interview in 2008, when Coulibaly explained how he was “transformed” by prison.

Of the 130 people killed by gunmen and suicide bombers during the November 13th terrorist attacks in Paris, the single worst toll was at the siege of the Bataclan theatre and music hall which left 90 people dead. It has since emerged that the Bataclan was already the target of a jihadist plot in 2010, while France’s justice minister has dismissed any connection between that and the massacre in November. Mediapart has obtained access to a Belgian police report sent to their French colleagues in 2011 which clearly identifies the close links between the main suspect in the 2010 plot and the French jihadist who fronted the Islamic State group’s video claiming responsibility for the November attacks.