When French police raided the home of Amedy Coulibaly, a suspected Islamic extremist, in May 2010 they found his computer crammed with religious texts, holiday pictures of himself with a veiled female companion and photographs of a “pedo-pornographic character,” according to an official record of the search. They also found 340 gun cartridges for a Kalashnikov automatic rifle.
Charged with involvement in a plot to spring a convicted Franco-Algerian terrorist from jail, Mr. Coulibaly denied any knowledge of any such a plan: “I’m the village idiot in all this. I know nothing about anything,” he told French investigators, “I have done stupid things but frankly there are limits.”
Whatever limits he may have had in 2010, however, disappeared by this past week, when Mr. Coulibaly, 32, and his 26-year-old companion, Hayat Boumeddiene, became prime suspects in a bloody rampage, the worst terrorist actions to hit France since the 1954-62 Algerian War.
Suspected of involvement in the roadside murder on Thursday of a trainee police officer in southern Paris, Mr. Coulibaly — armed with a Kalashniov rifle and an automatic pistol — on Friday seized a kosher supermarket in the east of the city. There, authorities say he killed four hostages before dying himself when elite police units stormed the building.
His companion has since disappeared and is reported to have fled abroad, possibly to Syria to try and join the Islamic State, to which Mr. Coulibaly declared allegiance in interviews with French broadcasters on Friday.
Before being fatally shot at the kosher supermarket, he called BFMTV, a French news network, to announce that he had “synchronized” his actions with those of Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, two brothers suspected of killing 12 people on Wednesday at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper that reveled in mocking Islam, Christianity and all forms of authority. The brothers, cornered in a printing plant near Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, were also killed by police on Friday.
“They started with Charlie Hebdo, and I started with the police,” Mr. Coulibaly told the television station, boasting proudly of his role in a series of attacks that led Prime Minister Manuel Vals on Saturday to declare France at war with radical Islam.
How difficult it will be to win the war, however, is shown by Mr. Coulibaly’s transformation, in plain sight, from small-time petty criminal to hardened jihadist.
Despite a long criminal record, he succeeded in presenting himself as a new man, securing a short-term job at a Coca-Cola plant, where he was a model employee. He was even invited to the Élysée Palace in 2009 to meet, along with other youths on a government work program, the president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Before he stormed into Hyper Cacher, a Jewish supermarket at Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris, he was already well known to French police for his six convictions — five for robbery and one for drugs.
He was also on their radar for his 2010 dealings with a host of Islamic extremists accused of plotting to spring Smaïn Ait Ali Belkacem, a jailed militant serving a life sentence for a 1995 attack on a rail station at the Musée d’Orsay.
For his role in the latter crime, Mr. Coulibaly was given a five-year sentence in December 2013. But, having already spent three years in pretrial detention, he was released less than a year later, joining Ms. Boumeddiene, whom he had married in a religious ceremony, at a small apartment she rented in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb south of Paris.
There, say neighbors, they lived quietly on the second floor of an apartment block. Its walls now bear stickers emblazoned with the slogan that, referring to the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, has become France’s rallying cry against radical Islam: “Je suis Charlie” — “I am Charlie!”
A neighbor on the first floor, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Thomas, said he last saw Mr. Coulibaly on New Year’s Day and had no idea about his criminal past until he heard about it on television on Friday, when the police issued wanted notice for the couple, declaring them “armed and dangerous.”
Earlier the same day, police officers broke down the door of their apartment and searched its contents.
“Here in the building, we suspected nothing about them,” said the neighbor, who did not want to be named for fear drawing attention.
A woman who lives a few doors away, who did not want to be identified for similar reasons, said she saw the couple often and had no suspicions. “They were nice, good people. They never did propaganda on religions or politics,” she said, recalling that Ms. Boumedienne had arrived two years ago, when Mr. Coulibaly was still in jail.
Born in France into a family of immigrants from Africa, Mr. Coulibaly had nine siblings, all of them women, and he showed little interest in religion until he got sent to jail for robbery in his early 20s and, while serving time at a prison in the Paris suburb of Fleury-Mérogis, got to know Djamel Beghal, a charismatic champion of jihad jailed in 2001 for a planned attack on the United States embassy in Paris.
He also met Chérif Kouachi, the younger of the two brothers who carried out last Wednesday’s attack on the newspaper.
Georges Sauveur, a Paris lawyer who defended Mr. Coulibaly in the 2013 jailbreak case, said “everything that has happened this last week goes back to this old affair.”
A judgment handed down by the court, detailed how Mr. Coulibaly traveled several times in 2010 to meet with Mr. Beghal, his former prison mate, who by that time had been freed and been placed under house arrest in the central French region of Cantal.
Telephone taps carried out by the antiterrorist squad showed how Mr. Beghal considered Mr. Coulibaly a trusted confederate in what, during conversations with other militants, he called “the marriage,” which investigators interpreted as code for a terrorist plot that including springing Mr. Belkacem out of jail.
In an April 2010 conversation with Mr. Belkacem in jail, Mr. Beghal described Mr. Coulibaly as “serious and determined” and in possession “of everything that was needed.”
What they needed most of all, said the lawyer, was weapons. Mr. Coulibaly, thanks to his previous career as an armed robber, “knew how to get guns cheaply.”
In one of his own calls that was tapped by authorities in March 2010, Mr. Coulibaly explained that he wanted to give a gift to an unnamed veteran of the war in Afghanistan who supposedly wanted to help Palestinian children. Mr. Beghal, he said, had told him this was necessary because “the children of Palestine are the fighters of tomorrow, my friend.”
(The New York Times)
