Video Shows Paris Terrorist Suspect Pledging Allegiance to Islamic State

Paris: Amedy Coulibaly, one of the three gunmen responsible for the terrorist attacks in France last week, produced a video that appeared online on Sunday, two days after his death, showing him sitting below the flag of the Islamic State militant group and pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the organization's leader.

The video - which was posted on Twitter and was authenticated by a former lawyer of Coulibaly's and a research group that tracks propaganda by militants - provides further evidence that the coordinated attacks last week were at a minimum inspired by organized terrorist groups.

The extent of Coulibaly's ties to the Islamic State, remains unclear, as does the question of whether he received any training or support from the group as he was said to have plotted the assaults in and around Paris with Said and Chérif Kouachi, brothers who said they were acting on behalf of al-Qaida's branch in Yemen.

The Islamic State split away from al-Qaida last year after years of ideological division, making the coordination between adherents of the rival groups the only known case in which their backers have cooperated to carry out such a high-profile assault.

The video, which is 7 minutes and 16 seconds long, opens with scenes of the 32-year-old Coulibaly doing pull-ups and push-ups at a training ground, as well as shots of his assembled arsenal of automatic weapons. The screen goes black, and the title appears: "A Soldier of the Caliphate."

In a reference to the Islamic State leader, al-Baghdadi, Coulibaly adds, "I pledge allegiance to the caliph."

The authorities say that Coulibaly was responsible for the killing of a police officer in Montrouge, a Paris suburb, on Thursday and a siege of a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday, where four hostages died. On Sunday, a prosecutor in France said that shell casings used in the shooting of a jogger in a Paris suburb Wednesday had been linked to the weapon that was said to have been used by Coulibaly at the supermarket, The Associated Press reported. The jogger survived.

Among the questions facing intelligence and security services is whether Coulibaly is a new model of terrorist, one who identifies with a particular organized group and takes inspiration and general direction from it but is not trained, supplied or directly financed by it.

Regarding his relationship to the Kouachi brothers, who are suspected of leading the attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo where 12 people were massacred, he states that they acted separately but with some coordination. His choice of words suggests that the assault on the publication, which had published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, was conceived separately by the Kouachis and that he piggybacked onto their attack.

"The brothers in our team divided themselves into two," he said.
"We partly worked together, but we also worked separately," he said, adding that he had helped one of the Kouachi brothers by providing several thousand euros "so that he could finish what he started and by the grace of God, we were able to synchronize ourselves."

Officials in the United States and France said Said Kouachi, 34, traveled to Yemen in 2011 to train with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, considered the terrorist group's most dangerous arm.

Kouachi, moreover, is known to have briefly shared a room with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a member of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, who tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit in 2009 using explosives hidden in his underwear. Intelligence and security agencies are also investigating whether Chérif Kouachi also traveled to Yemen.

?Hours before his death in a hail of gunfire Friday, Chérif Kouachi, 32, told a French television reporter by telephone that he had been sent by al-Qaida in Yemen and had been financed by the group's best-known propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki.

Neither the Islamic State nor the Qaida group has issued an official statement claiming responsibility, although a member of the al-Qaida group sent reporters a text message over the weekend, stating that it had chosen the targets in France and was responsible.

The former lawyer for Coulibaly said that he recognized him in the video clip, but he remarked on the contrast in his appearance. The young man he knew - who had been arrested and charged with more than half a dozen offenses including armed robbery as well as over a previous terrorist-linked plot - liked to keep pictures of himself posing shirtless on white sand beaches with bikini-clad women, said the lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so that he could discuss classified information.

He also liked to keep pseudo-pornographic images of himself. A computer belonging to Coulibaly that was seized by the police during a 2010 operation found numerous images of him naked and in suggestive poses - the kind that a man might send to his girlfriend.

In the video, Coulibaly is shown in a white jellalaba, or Muslim robe, with a traditional cap, suggesting a pious Muslim, or else wearing a bulletproof vest as he rants against the West.

According to investigators, Coulibaly originally met Chérif Kouachi in jail in a decade ago, where both were acolytes of Djamel Beghal, a champion of jihad. They stayed in touch and after all three were released, investigators said, they began plotting to get another person accused of being a terrorist out of jail.
Coulibaly and Kouachi were said to have traveled together in 2010 to the site in the French countryside where Beghal was put under house arrest after his release. Because of the use of what were thought to be code words, like "preparations for a wedding," the police deduced that they were plotting to get an accused terrorist out of a French jail, and Coulibaly was arrested again. He was in jail until March 4, when he was released - 10 months before last week's attacks.

"What we are doing is completely justified," he said in the tape, adding: "We are avenging the Prophet. We, the Islamic State, attack you."