This Article is From Jan 18, 2015

A Jihadi's Journey From Scared Amateur to Paris Slaughterer

Paris: In the year after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a 22-year-old pizza deliveryman here couldn't take it anymore. Sickened by images of U.S. soldiers humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison, he made plans to go fight U.S. forces in Iraq. He studied a virtual AK-47 on a website. Then he took lessons from a man, using a hand-drawn picture of a gun.

It was an almost laughable attempt at jihad, and as the day of his departure approached, the deliveryman, Cherif Kouachi, felt increasingly unsure of himself.

When the police arrested him hours before his 6:45 a.m. Alitalia flight on Jan. 25, 2005, he was relieved. "Several times, I felt like pulling out. I didn't want to die there," he later told investigators. "I told myself that if I chickened out, they would call me a coward, so I decided to go anyway, despite the reservations I had."

A decade later, Cherif Kouachi, flanked by his older brother Said, no longer had any reservations, as the two jihadis in black, sheathed in body armor, gave a global audience a ruthless demonstration in terror.

Walking with military precision into the guarded Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, they killed 12 people in the name of Allah. Then in the hours before the brothers died in a gunfight with the police, Cherif nonchalantly took a telephone call from a reporter to make sure the world knew they were carrying out the attack on behalf of al-Qaida's branch in Yemen.

The 10-year evolution from easily spooked amateur to hardened killer is a story of steadily deepening radicalism that occurred virtually under the noses of French authorities, who twice had Cherif in their grasp.

After the arrest of Cherif in 2005, when he was no more than a fledgling jihadi, he spent 20 months in prison. There, he met and became an acolyte of al-Qaida's top operative in France, Djamel Beghal, who had been dispatched to Paris to set up a cell aimed at attacking U.S. interests here, French counterterrorism officials said.

He also befriended a convicted robber, Amedy Coulibaly, who would later synchronize his own terror attack with the Kouachi brothers, killing a police officer and staging a siege inside a kosher supermarket in the days after the Charlie Hebdo carnage, bringing the death toll to 17.

Much remains unclear about their lives. But thousands of pages of legal documents obtained by The New York Times - including minutes of interrogations, summaries of phone taps, intercepted jailhouse letters, and a catalog of images and religious texts found on the laptops of Cherif Kouachi and Coulibaly - reveal an arc of radicalization that saw them become steadily more professional and more discreet.

After at least one of the Kouachis traveled to Yemen in 2011, the United States alerted French authorities. But three years of tailing the brothers yielded nothing, and an oversight commission ruled that the surveillance was no longer productive, said Louis Caprioli, the deputy head of France's domestic anti-terror unit from 1998 to 2004.

The brothers appeared so nonthreatening that surveillance was dropped in the middle of last year, he said, as hundreds of young Muslims cycled back and forth to Syria for jihad and French authorities shifted priorities.

"The system is overwhelmed," said Jean-Charles Brisard, a terrorism expert who is a former counsel to France's chief anti-terrorism prosecutor.

By the time the brothers burst through the heavy metal doors of Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7, the newspaper that had repeatedly lampooned the Prophet Muhammad, even their relatives were shocked.

"The only way I can make sense of this," Khadija Hamyd, Cherif Kouachi's sister-in-law, said, "is to say that he was leading a double life."

The brothers moved to Paris around 2000, staying in an apartment in  the 19th Arrondissement, a working-class neighborhood heavy populated with newly arrived Muslim immigrants from France's former colonies in North Africa.

Cherif Kouachi got a job delivering pizzas. Then, after the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the brothers began attending prayers at the Adda'wa Mosque on Rue de Tanger. It was here that the Kouachi brothers met Farid Benyettou, then 22, the son of Algerian immigrants.

Benyettou's sister had been expelled from the Pailleron secondary school in Paris for refusing to take off the niqab, according to their former neighbor, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss their private lives. To the impressionable Cherif, Benyettou's devoutness was striking. Benyettou incited young men to join jihad. He set up a pipeline for young French Muslims to travel to join Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network in Iraq, which would soon become al-Qaida's franchise in the region, according to a detailed account in the court files.

It was Cherif who began clamoring to stage an attack in France.

"Cherif never stopped talking about the Jewish shops, of attacking them in the street in order to kill them," said his friend and co-conspirator Thamer Bouchnak during his deposition. "He talked obsessively about this - about doing something here in France."

"He asked Farid Benyettou if it was allowed," Bouchnak added. "He wanted to have permission from the person who had taught him. Farid didn't give his permission."

Instead, Cherif decided to head to Iraq, but grew increasingly anxious. He was relieved when he saw the police officers coming to arrest him, said his lawyer, Vincent Ollivier.

"He was a lost kid who was scared to death," Ollivier told the French newspaper Le Figaro last week. "I will never know if the person he became is the result of his time in jail, or else the result of a hardening of his commitment."

In 2006, Cherif was released from prison under judicial supervision as the case continued. He would be convicted in 2008 but sentenced to time served. His time inside the Fleury-Merogis prison, a hotbed of radical Islam, had changed him, though.

Leaving prison also reunited Cherif with his older brother. As his brother became more radicalized behind bars, Said also veered toward a stricter form of Islam, though his path is less documented.

At Charlie Hebdo, there was no sign marking the offices. So constant were the threats against the publication that Zineb El Rhazoui, one of the newspaper's journalists, said the staff members - and French authorities - had become somewhat inured, even though the newspaper had been firebombed in 2011.

Entering the building required a magnetic key. Upstairs, the office had a metal, bulletproof door that required a code to open.

None of it mattered. The onetime pizza deliveryman, who had once practiced jihad with a paper gun, knew critical details.

The entire editorial staff met only once a week on Wednesdays, for two hours starting at 10 a.m. The Kouachis broke into the office on Wednesday, Jan. 7, at 11:15 a.m.

"These were no amateurs," El Rhazoui said. "I am convinced they were not acting independently. This was an operation that was commanded from above."

The Kouachis left bodies piled on the floor, survivors crying or cowering in fear, and then they walked onto the street, with one brother pumping his weapon in the air. They shot a police officer who rushed to the scene and then nonchalantly killed him with a bullet to the head. The next day, Coulibaly wounded a city employee and killed a police officer.

By Friday, Jan. 9, as the police had cornered the Kouachis at a printing factory on the outskirts of Paris, Coulibaly stormed into the Hyper Cacher market, killing four people and taking more than a dozen hostage before the police stormed the store, pouring bullets into his chest.

At the printing factory where the Kouachis would stage their final, fatal gunbattle with the police, the owner, Michel Catalano, later told reporters that he assumed he was about to die when the two brothers first approached, bearing machine guns and a rocket launcher.

When a salesman came to the door, one of the brothers told him to go away.

"Leave," the brother said, like a soldier. "We don't shoot civilians." 
© 2015, The New York Times News Service
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