Along the pathways of Paris’s picturesque Buttes-Chaumont park, with its hills, lake and faux Roman temple, Chérif Kouachi, a local pizza deliveryman, would regularly go jogging. Past the waffle stands, pavilion restaurant, picnickers and children’s play areas, there are always runners working up a sweat up on the park’s steep inclines. But Kouachi and his small group of jogging mates had a particular purpose a criminal court would later hear: they were keeping fit for foreign jihad.
The group of Parisian friends were all in their early 20s; many had met at a local middle school, most had poor school records and chaotic family lives. They came from deprived corners of the surrounding 19th arrondissement in north-eastern Paris, a mix of gentrified apartment buildings, working-class streets and a patchwork of high-rises troubled by gang turf-wars.
The dozen or so friends, mainly unemployed or in small jobs, were involved in petty crime, theft, drugs, trafficking. But then they met a young charismatic guru figure at a local mosque. Also in his 20s, and only a year older than Kouachi, Farid Benyettou was working as a cleaner but holding discussion groups in his flat about fighting jihad. It was 2004, the aftermath of the Iraq war, and gradually the friends resolved to go to the country to fight the Americans.
This little group, which in court was described as staggeringly amateurish, was deemed by Le Monde “the first jihad school in France”. After jogging sessions and a quick demonstration of how to hold a Kalashnikov, a handful of the friends had left at various points to fight holy war in Iraq. Three were killed, others returned badly maimed, one minus an arm and an eye. Others were thwarted in their plans by to leave by the French police.
Kouachi, who scraped a living delivering for El Primo Pizza on the other side of the ring-road that serves as a moat around Paris, was arrested in January 2005 on his way to catch a flight to Damascus, believed to be ultimately heading for Iraq.
He told the court he was relieved to have been stopped because he hadn’t actually wanted to go. “The more my departure approached, the more I wanted to go back on it,” he told the judge. “But if I chickened out, I was scared I would look like a coward.” He got a relatively light prison sentence, three years with 18 months suspended, as there was little hard evidence against him except a plane ticket for Damascus. To lawyers, he seemed to be a fragile young kid with few real political ideas, psychologically manipulated into a sect-like group. After the 2008 trial, he settled down and got a job on a supermarket fish counter.
A decade later Kouachi, 32, and his older brother Saïd, 34, led the deadliest terrorist attack on France for 50 years, beginning by walking into the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and opening fire with Kalashnikovs, killing 12, including a Muslim policeman on the street outside. After a three-day reign of terror the brothers were shot dead by police following a hostage drama north of Paris. In parallel Amédy Coulibaly, 32, first shot a policewoman and then held hostages at a kosher supermarket in east Paris, killing four, before police shot him dead.
All three gunmen were French, from the Paris area, raised and radicalised there. The daily Libération called them “kids of France”. One lawyer on the case of the “Buttes-Chaumont” cell called them the “lost children of the Republic”.
The government now faces serious questions about homegrown terrorism and how men with convictions, jail terms and a place on the US blacklist slipped through the net. France had been deeply concerned about potential attacks by a new wave of French jihadis returning from Syria, and had recently stepped up anti-terrorism measures.
The government said some 1,400 people living in France had joined the jihadi cause in Syria or Iraq or were planning to. About 70 French citizens or residents had died in terrorist ranks in Syria and Iraq.
But the radicalisation of the Kouachis and Coulibaly began long before the Syria crisis.
Today, French jihadis heading to Syria are emerging from varied, often middle-class backgrounds, sometimes with a good education and prospects. In contrast, those aspiring to fight in Iraq 10 years ago were seen as psychologically fragile, poor and with no perspectives. Questions will now be asked over why the earlier Iraq-inspired radicals such as Kouachi and his friends, who clearly still posed a major threat, were able to slip through the home security net – and whether they were left to one side as security services focused on the new Syria generation.
Chérif Kouachi was born in 1980 in Paris’s diverse 10th arrondissement, which stretches from the Place de la République to the Gare du Nord. He was one of five children of Algerian immigrant parents. A source who knew Chérif Kouachi at the time of his first arrest on his way to catch the flight to Damascus in 2005 told the Guardian: “He was abandoned very young; it’s not clear if his parents couldn’t look after the children or if his parents died. But he was put in care homes early – before the age of 10.” The care homes were far from Paris and his childhood was described as chaotic. When he reached 18 he returned to the north-east of Paris with his elder brother. He had a sports education qualification, but a poor school record and no other family support. When he became involved in the Buttes-Chaumont group of friends he was back in Paris but living precariously.
“He was living almost like a homeless person, staying with someone but it was more of a mattress on the floor than a real home. He was very clearly marginalised. He was immature, just out of adolescence. He wasn’t vindictive … He went to the mosque, but went clubbing, made rap music, smoked hash, drank. He wasn’t a hermit,” the source said.
It seemed at the time that Benyettou, the young guru figure by whom Kouachi was enthralled, used methods similar to those of a sect.
“He made him feel important, he listened to him, recognised him as an individual … Chérif Kouachi was fragile, looking for a family … he didn’t have a family he could turn to for support.”
At that point, the young Kouachi, known as Abou Issen in the group, didn’t seem structured in his thinking. “He couldn’t differentiate between Islam and Catholicism” and wasn’t well educated, said the source.
When he was arrested over the attempted flight to Syria and Iraq, Kouachi described himself to investigators as a “ghetto Muslim”, according to Le Monde. “Before, I was a delinquent. But after I felt great. I didn’t even imagine that I could die,” he told the court. A French TV documentary on radicalised youth showed footage of him rapping and talking about how he learned that: “It’s written in the texts that it’s good to die as a martyr.”
The Buttes-Chaumont group’s jihadi aspirations were directly linked to the second Iraq war in 2003. They would sit in apartments watching footage of the US-led invasion. “Everything I saw on TV, the torture in Abu Ghraib prison, all that, that’s what motivated me,” one of Kouachi’s friends told their trial.
But under Jacques Chirac, France had refused to intervene in the Iraq war and the young cell’s stance wasn’t really a movement against the French state. It was more a rage directed against the US. Some of the group stated that jihad wasn’t done in France. The focal point was fighting a foreign invader in Iraq.
“They were the pioneers of French jihadiism,” said Jacques Follorou, a journalist at Le Monde and author of the book Democracy under Control, the Posthumous Victory of Bin Laden, about security issues.
“This was a group of kids with very little education, without a political project, inexperienced, de-socialised, on the margins, delinquent, unemployed. In their mentor, who was their own age, they had a manipulator. They were looking for identity.”
He added that when the young men were arrested and held on remand before their case in 2008, prison gave them access to a universe never known before. “If the Butte-Chaumonts was an informal school of jihad, prison was the superior diploma.”
After his arrest while trying to fly to Damascus in 2005, Kouachi was on remand in the notorious Fleury-Mérogis prison south of Paris, a super-size decaying concrete mega-jail, which is Europe’s largest prison.
The men’s section alone holds 3,800 people – bigger than any jail in Britain. Built in the 1960s, it was supposed to be a model for incarceration but became a byword for tension, inmate violence, drugs, suicide and even the hostage-taking of prison officers.
It is now being refurbished. But at the time Kouachi was placed there pending the legal investigation, it was suffering over 150% over-crowding and Victorian conditions. In 2007, just after Kouachi left and was bailed after 18 months on remand, the International Observatory of Prisons, citing an expert report, complained the conditions were so insalubrious they were dangerous to the health and security of inmates and staff.
Space in overcrowded cells was less than animals were usually afforded, the report warned, complaining of no windows or views, just skylights and lack of fresh air.
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In 2008, prisoners smuggled out video footage of the conditions, showing violence between inmates in the exercise yard, leaking ceilings, moss on walls, fetid toilets, birds nesting in the decaying walls, stagnant water and freezing conditions. “We’re freezing like homeless people. Even homeless people are better off than us,” one said.
One of the prisoners involved in publicising the terrible conditions was Amédy Coulibaly. He was an armed robber on his third sentence, this time for robbery, receiving stolen goods and using false number plates. Coulibaly met Kouachi inside the prison and they became close during seven months on the same wing – prisoners from similar backgrounds and affinity were kept together on the same blocks, which allowed them to convene. Less than a decade later, Coulibaly joined the Kouachis in last week’s terrorist attacks, killing a police officer and four hostages in a kosher supermarket.
Coulibaly, known as “Doly”, was born in France to parents from Mali. He was the only boy, with nine sisters, and grew up on a notorious housing estate, La Grande-Borne, in Grigny, south of Paris. “One of the most difficult estates in France,” said Malek Boutih, a former anti-racism campaigner who is now Socialist MP for the area.
Built as a 1960s social utopia with winding coloured buildings it was meant to be an ideal dormitory town. Instead, with 11,000 inhabitants, it has become known for poverty, drug dealing, arms trafficking, youth criminality and attacks on police, as well as arson attacks on public buildings.
Boutih calls it a “social dustbin” to where people were unfairly pushed out. “It has a big black population, who are often people who can’t find housing even when they’re working. There’s at least 40% unemployment, broken families, a high level of violence and decomposition.
“It’s an environment very favourable to radical branches. It’s not so much poverty that leads to it, it’s the decay of social order. There is extreme societal misery, but it’s the fact that it has just been abandoned by the state.” Boutih felt republican values – the cherished liberty, fraternity, equality - just weren’t applied there; that the state had been absent.
If employers saw the estate’s address on a CV, it was likely the job application would go straight in the bin.
In 2005, France’s suburban tower blocks erupted in the worst riots in modern French history after the deaths of two boys who had been running from police on the other side of Paris. But it was in Grigny that the tension of the riots escalated to a higher level, when youths on the estate fired the first gunshots at police.
Like other troubled estates, the Grande-Borne had a youth culture of fast money, robbery, drugs and guns. Damien Brossier, a lawyer in nearby Évry, who deals with cases of youth crime from estates, remembers Coulibaly as a “hot-headed” and daring teenager whom he twice defended in armed robbery cases more than a decade ago.
“The first case was the armed robbery of a sports clothing shop. It stood out because his getaway car was in an accident and rolled off a bridge, but Coulibaly nonetheless got out of the car, badly bruised, and went straight back to school where he just sat down and got on with his class.”
Brossier later defended him for an armed bank robbery. “There was a mad-dog element about him,” he said. “He was friendly, he was not unpleasant, he wasn’t hard to talk to, there wasn’t a tension. One created a superficial relationship with him.”
He said Coulibaly’s father was from a modest background who had come to France to work in poorly paid jobs. Like many young kids in the area his son didn’t want the same life; he fell between his parents’ model and the reality of life on the estate.
“He didn’t have a good school record, I don’t think he had real professional ambitions. Like others there was a culture of money and that money should come fast. He was audacious, he loved action and adrenalin.” One of his sisters, who had children, seemed fed up of seeing her brother in trouble with the law and having to pay a small part of lawyers’ fees.
In prison together, Kouachi and Coulibaly found not only friendship but a mentor who radicalised them, Djamel Beghal . The portly Beghal, serving a 10-year sentence for a plot to bomb the US embassy in Paris, had once been a regular worshipper at Finsbury Park mosque in London and a disciple of the radical preachers Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada. He came to be seen by UK and French intelligence as one of al-Qaida’s leading recruiters in Europe.
When Chérif Kouachi left prison, he appeared to want to get his life together; he married and got the fish counter job on the outskirts of Paris. Although he seemed embittered by prison, the source who knew him observed: “Physically he had grown. He had been weightlifting. But everyone does that in prison, there’s nothing else to do.”
Benyettou, the Buttes-Chaumont guru, later began to train as a nurse. Coulibaly got an apprentice contract at a Coca-Cola factory in Grigny and in 2009, despite his criminal record, was one of 500 young people invited to the Élysée to meet Nicolas Sarkozy at an event about youth unemployment. “At least he might be able to help me get a job,” Coulibaly told the local edition of Le Parisien newspaper at the time.
But less than a year after that reception, police swooped in a new investigation. They suspected a plot to free an Algerian Islamist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002 for a bombing at the Musée d’Orsay railway station in Paris in October 1995 that left around 30 injured. Beghal’s disciples were arrested over conspiring in the plot.
Surveillance showed Kouachi and Coulibaly had been visiting Beghal, where he was under house arrest in rural central France. Coulibaly would later take selfies on countryside training and photograph his partner, Hayat Boumeddiene, firing a crossbow while wearing a niqab. Boumeddiene, who had married Coulibaly in a religious ceremony, had left her job as a supermarket cashier in order to wear niqab, an item of clothing which Sarkozy’s government was in the process of banning from all public spaces.
Boumeddiene, who is on the run and is believed to have travelled to Syria last week, grew up in care homes outside Paris after her mother died and her father couldn’t look after the family.
During a search at the couple’s home in Bagneux outside Paris, police found a large amount of Kalashnikov ammunition hidden in a paint bucket and a revolver hidden in a cupboard. “They belong to me,” Coulibaly told police, according to the investigative website Mediapart. “They are ‘Kalash’ cartridges. I’m looking to sell them on the street.” Asked about religion, Coulibably told police he tried his best but he wasn’t really that religious at all.
Kouachi kept silent during police questioning. Due to a lack of evidence, the case against him was dropped. Coulibaly got five years in prison for the escape plot. He was described as a model inmate and was released in spring 2014. Boumeddiene was there to meet him and they resumed life together. Less than a year later, he would be part of one of France’s worst terrorist attacks in decades.
An earlier courtroom psychiatric report on Coulibaly cited by Libération found “no pathology” but an “immature and psychopathic personality”. The psychologist had pointed to “his poor powers of introspection” and the “rudimentary” nature of the motivation of his actions, as well as sense of morality that was lacking and a wish to be “all powerful”.
Police interceptions in 2010 showed him asking his mentor Beghal what would happen if he left financial debt behind after death. “You know when they say that when you die you mustn’t leave debts … Are there any circumstances where you can die with debts?” he asked, according to transcripts in Le Monde. Coulibaly was worried because a friend had told him: “The prophet says you can leave sins behind you but absolutely not debt.”
A witness account from the kosher grocery hold-up described how, after shooting four of his hostages, whose bodies lay where they had fallen, he nonchalantly made himself a sandwich from the supplies in the store, telling the remaining hostages to do the same
This weekend, Coulibaly’s mother and sisters issued a statement distancing themselves from him and condemning his attacks, which they called “hateful acts”.
Chérif Kouachi’s elder brother Saïd, who was understood to have done most of the shooting in the Charlie Hebdo attack, was the only one of the three who had not been in prison in France. But he had been questioned by police and released over the Buttes-Chaumont jihadi cell in 2005. At the time, he seemed more poised and a little more interested than his brother in finding a job, said the source who knew them.
Yemeni security officials confirmed that he had spent several months in the country, was suspected of having fought for al-Qaida and was probably among a group of foreigners deported from Yemen in 2012. Both brothers were on US and UK no-fly lists.
In the runup to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Saïd had been living with his wife and small children in a block of flats in Reims, in the Champagne region, where neighbours had described him as solitary.
As the investigation continues, the debate about any failings by the security forces and intelligence services is likely to become a key political issue as France confronts the issue of homegrown terrorism.
The country still bears the scars of 2012, when Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old unemployed Toulouse panel-beater and convicted juvenile delinquent who had recently returned from Pakistan and Afghanistan, was able to lead a 10-day shooting spree, which ended with a rabbi and three Jewish children shot dead at point-blank range at a Jewish school.
Medhi Nemmouche, a French former juvenile delinquent who grew up in a poor town in northern France, abandoned by his mother and raised in care, is in custody in Belgium, suspected of shooting dead four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels last year, after fighting for Islamic State in Syria.
French media have pointed out the far-reaching connections of Kouachi’s Buttes-Chaumont gang – including with Salim Benghalem, whom the US has described as being a French extremist in Syria for Islamic state “who carries out executions on behalf of the group”.
The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has promised to address any failings as the gunmen’s background continues to be pored over.
The first announcement came swiftly on Monday. Valls said France would move to isolate Islamist detainees from the rest of the prisoner population to prevent jails from being used as a breeding ground for radicals. This measure “must become widespread” but “it must be done discerningly and intelligently”, he added.
Dounia Bouzar, a French anthropologist who heads an early-warning centre to support families of French teenagers tempted by jihad or who have left for Syria, said she felt the profile of jihadi recruits in France was changing.
Kouachi, Merah and Nemmouche were in some ways part of a French “old guard”, fragile and often with families originally from the Maghreb.
“A fundamentalist discourse is more easily latched on to by people who don’t feel important … It’s about transferring a feeling of malaise into a feeling of being all powerful. They become someone important,” she said.
She felt now that the profile was changing and widening, creating new challenges. “People say simply discrimination plus social malaise equals terrorism, that’s not true.”
Of the families she had recently spoken to she had seen children of educated parents, including doctors, or youngsters leaving medical school, and many from non-Muslim backgrounds. The profiles of jihadis radicalised and self-radicalised in France were increasingly complex and nuanced.
After the unity of France’s massive street rallies against the attacks, the political class is now faced with tough questions.