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Sleeper cell awakes France’s worst fears in three days of terror

People gather at the Place Royale in Nantes to show their solidarity for the victims of the attack by gunmen on the offices of the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo. — AFP/File

PARIS: Blood-curdling, Al Qaeda-inspired murder that tore at the heart of the nation which raised him was not ghoulish enough for Cherif Kouachi. His body, felled by elite soldiers' bullets and stun grenades, was not yet cold when he also came back from the dead.

Kouachi had picked up the phone when a reporter for news channel BFM rang the printing plant, his and his elder brother Said's final redoubt, where an army of soldiers, police officers, and helicopters cornered them after a 40-plus-hour manhunt through villages and woodlands of northern France.

BFM waited until after the brothers and another member of their terror cell, who killed four hostages in a kosher grocery in Paris, were dead before broadcasting its haunting audio.

Sounding determined and so chillingly sure of himself and his extremist rhetoric, Kouachi's fluent French put words to France's worst nightmare: its own sons, heads filled with dreams of murder and martyrdom, coming home from foreign battlefields to wage war.

“We are the defenders of the Prophet,” he said. “I, Cherif Kouachi, was sent by Al Qaeda from Yemen.” Paris will never quite be the same after the carnage that started Wednesday. Never again will fears of homegrown terrorists coming back battled-hardened by extremist training, indoctrination and fighting in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere to commit mass murder be just theories.

As Prime Minister Manuel Valls would later say: “There will be a before and an after.” Heavily armed, dressed head-to-toe in black, the Kouachi brothers forced their way into the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo as the satirical magazine's staff gathered for an editorial meeting.

Household names in a country which regards cartoons as serious literature and a gateway to reading for children, Charlie's artists had already been up to their usual mischief, tweeting moments earlier a cartoon of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State group, sending New Year wishes with the words “above all, good health!”

More than merely cheeky, the weekly's drawings are often grossly offensive. Proudly calling itself an “irresponsible newspaper,” it put an erect male member on its front cover as long ago as 1974. But it had its place in French newsstands and hearts. It may not always have made them laugh, but its very existence demonstrated that freedom of speech was alive and kicking.

Charlie Hebdo artist Jean Cabut, known simply as Cabu, also featured in and drew for a fondly remembered children's television program in the 1980s. His killing by the Kouachi brothers felt, to some, like the death of their childhoods, too.

Shouting “Allahu akbar!” — God is great in Arabic — the Kouachi brothers had, in their own words, come to avenge Charlie Hebdo's caricatures that have repeatedly poked fun at the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

Charlie's cartoonists knew this was incendiary stuff. A firebombing destroyed their offices in 2011. Editor Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, had a police bodyguard and was on an Al Qaeda hit list. After the assassinations, distraught people around the world flooded social media with the phrase “I am Charlie.”

But that isn't, strictly speaking, true: not everyone has the courage to keep going to work in the face of such danger. The gunmen headed straight for Charbonnier, killing him and his bodyguard first, said Christophe Crepin, a police union spokesman. Also sprayed with bullets and murdered were seven other journalists, among them leading cartoonists, a maintenance worker and a visitor.

A grisly photo showing trails of blood and papers strewn across the office floor testified to the cruelty that, in weeks and months ahead, will test how attached the French — non-Muslims and the estimated 5 million who follow the teachings of the Quran — are to their liberties and to each other. Back outside, the gunmen rejoiced.

“Hey! We avenged the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). We killed Charlie Hebdo!” they were heard yelling on amateur video. It also showed them coolly interrupting their getaway to kill another policeman, finishing him with a shot to the head as he writhed injured on a sidewalk. The officer was later identified as Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim.

The phrase “Je Suis Ahmed” — I Am Ahmed — caught fire on social media. Police unions were horrified to see weapons of war, semi-automatic rifles firing high-velocity rounds, used against officers who arrived on mountain bikes and in flimsy Renaults.

Already, debate has begun on whether security services need bigger weapons and more resources to keep better track of hundreds of men and women who have traveled overseas for militancy. The challenge for France and other European democracies who know they could be the next targets is to boost security without compromising on liberty.

The Kouachi brothers exploited what is both democracies' weakness and strength: fundamental respect for citizens' rights, even for those suspected of terrorist links and sympathies. Cherif Kouachi, 32, was convicted on terrorism charges in 2008.

Said, 34, is believed to have trained and fought with Al Qaeda forces while in Yemen. Both were barred from travel to the United States, according to a senior US official, because of such links. But Said had no criminal record, and the latest legal case against Cherif was ultimately thrown out.

Their competence with weapons, the way one kept guard while the other executed Merabet, the attack timed for the editorial meeting, made immediately clear the gunmen were trained, focused and working to a plan.

That Said Kouachi left his ID card in their getaway car, leaving a trail police jumped on, was simply baffling. That same afternoon, just hours after the attack, police identified the Kouachi brothers as suspects and later released their mugshots, both with small chin beards and close-cropped hair. The hunt was on.

The trail led SWAT teams backed by helicopters to the Picardie region north of Paris, through which troops marched a century earlier to the gory trenches of World War I. Back in Paris, under leaden, tearful skies, the mood was morose. Everyone coped with the numbness of shock as they could.

Absurd as it must have seemed, I walked the Champs-Elysees to work with my right arm thrust in the air, clutching a pen. Others left flowers, candles and, of course, drawings at makeshift shrines. A midday national moment of silence, with people falling quiet mid-phone call, the gargantuan bell of Notre Dame Cathedral tolling like a mournful heartbeat, and strangers staring at each other on halted subway trains, brought the welcome respite of solidarity.

The mutual sharing of shoulders to lean on bore out the enduring truth of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” the national motto of a famously squabble-fond country that Charles de Gaulle once complained is ungovernable.

But as lights on the Eiffel Tower were extinguished that night in tribute, the Kouachi brothers appeared, incredibly, to have slipped the dragnet, having robbed a gas station and later vanished into woodlands. That and the shooting death of a policewoman in southern Paris early that morning doomed the city to an uneasy sleep.

Friday, Jan 9, 2015 — like Wednesday, Jan 7, for that matter — will, for the French, always be one of those “where were you when?” days. It started with news of the Kouachi brothers; one injured in the throat in an earlier shootout with police, finally cornered in a printing house near Paris' main international airport, Charles de Gaulle, which closed two runways as helicopters buzzed over the terrorists' hideout.

It ended, however, not only with their deaths but also with four hostages killed at a kosher Paris supermarket by a long-time friend of the Kouachis and the sinking realisation that these three days of terror were more than radicalised brothers on a murderous rampage.

This was the awakening of a sleeper cell of three, possibly more, homegrown terrorists who plotted and turned on their country together. Like Cherif Kouachi, the Paris hostage-taker, Amedy Coulibaly, also came back to haunt France even in death.

In a telephone interview with BFM from inside the grocery store, extracts of which the channel also broadcast after police killed him, Coulibaly explained with unnerving nonchalance that he and the Kouachis “synchronised the operations” and that while the brothers attacked Charlie Hebdo, “I started to do the police.”

He is thought to also have killed the policewoman in Thursday's shooting. BFM said he claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group. Seemingly determined to go out in a blaze, as self-styled martyrs, the Kouachis came out firing, continuing to shoot at elite forces even after stun grenades blew them off their feet, said Francois Molins, the Paris public prosecutor.

At that point, they were shot and killed. Almost simultaneously, reportedly as they heard Coulibaly reciting final prayers, police assaulted the grocery to stop him carrying out his threat to kill his 15 hostages if the Kouachis weren't freed.

Fierce exchanges of fire ended with Coulibaly running toward the heavily armed officers and felled by their hail of bullets. Three days of bloodshed were over. But the terror they caused is not. Authorities have yet to collar Coulibaly's widow, Hayat Boumeddiene, sought herself as an “armed and dangerous” suspect and who once posed for a photo holding a crossbow in her Islamic veil.

“We're a country at war. What I saw today was a war,” said Daikh Ramdan, a Paris service station manager rattled after witnessing the thunderous booms and gunshots of Coulibaly's end. “You have the impression you are already dead, you are vulnerable, you're cold, your heart is beating, you breathe hard,” he said. “It's very complicated. You have the impression you are no longer a man, no longer a man.”

Muslim man hailed hero for sheltering customers in Jewish market attack

Lassana Bathily, who helped hostages out of deli - DailyMail photo

A young Muslim shop assistant is being hailed a hero for giving a safe hiding place to hostages fleeing gunman Amedy Coulibaly after he stormed a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

Originally from Mali in west Africa, 24-year-old Lassana Bathily reportedly guided frightened customers to safety in a storage freezer as the gunman took hold of the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, Paris, on Friday.

The Independent reports that Bathily has been praised for his role in helping customers.

"When they ran down, I opened the door (from the freezer),” he told BFMTV.

"There are several people who came to me. I turned off the light, I turned off the freezer.”

"When I turned off the cold, I put them [hostages] in, I closed the door, I told them to stay calm."

Daily Mail reports that escaped using a goods lift and was able to give police valuable information about what was happening inside and where the hostages were hiding.

Reluctant to tell his story he said that after the shoot-out many of the customers came to shake his hand and thank him for what he did.

At least five people, including the attacker, died at a kosher grocery in Paris where a gunman took several hostages.French President Francois Hollande confirmed that four hostages were killed in the siege.His picture – labelled Malian Muslim – has been tweeted around the world as a symbol of the good of people united against terrorism.

“It is indeed an appalling anti-Semitic act that was committed,” he said of the hostage-taking by a gunman at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in the Vincennes district.

Hollande called for national unity and said the country should remain “implacable” in the face of racism and anti-Semitism.

Security forces stormed the grocery minutes after their counterparts assaulted the building outside Paris where two brothers suspected in the Charlie Hebdo killings had holed up.

Muslim policeman's killing sparks anger

A Muslim police officer was brutally executed in the street during the horrific Charlie Hebdo terror attack.

Footage showed Ahmed Merabet being shot by terrorists at point-blank range during the attack at the magazine's Paris office.

The 42-year-old bicycle patrolman's death has led to an outpouring of sympathy in France. His name trended on Twitter under the rallying cry #JeSuisAhmed - or “I Am Ahmed”.

Many of the thousands who showed solidarity with the officer pointed out he died protecting those who ridiculed his religion.

A tweet by Dyab Abou Jahjah, retweeted more than 36,000 times, said: “I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so. #JesuisAhmed”.

Merabet’s colleagues were in shock at the brutal way he was “shot down like a dog”

Fanaticism: From Peshawar to Paris

A French soldier stands guard in front of the Eiffel Tower as Paris is placed under the highest alert status. —AFP

 

If their agenda is to put a wedge between Muslims and the rest, the Jihadists are doing a pretty fine job.

 

The attack in Paris that killed 12 journalists and police at the office of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo occurred only a day after thousands of ordinary Germans marched in support of Muslims in Berlin and Cologne. The Germans came out in thousands in response to the earlier anti-Muslim rally in Dresden.
Despite the economic hardships seen since 2009, Europe has largely remained a welcoming place for Muslims.

Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, however, have a different agenda. They want to define the relationship between Islam and the West. The Paris attack appears to be a retaliation against the caricatures of revered figures of Islam published earlier by Charlie Hebdo. The editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, also among the dead, had received death threats in the past.



From Paris to Peshawar, a plague of intolerance has swept through parts of Muslim societies. The Taliban kill children in Allah’s name, and are unrepentant. The police even murdered an accused left in their protective custody. The man on the street turns to violence when his religious sensibilities are disturbed.

There are the lynch mobs in Punjab who burnt alive a pregnant woman and her husband after accusing them of blasphemy. The couple’s toddler witnessed the lynching and narrated the story that will haunt him forever.
If poverty is Pakistan’s excuse for wholesale fanaticism, what is the excuse for Iran, which is set to execute 30-year old Soheil Arabi for “insulting the Prophet” in his Facebook posts? A few decades earlier, Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a death sentence to Salman Rushdie for similar accusations.
Would anyone care to stop and think why Muslims are killing in the name of the Prophet (PBUH) who always pardoned those who transgressed against his person?

The Islamic teachings we grew up with conflict squarely with what the armed, bearded, and hooded men proclaim today.

—Source: Pew Research Global Attitudes Project Spring 2013. 

We were told as children how the Prophet (PBUH) looked after the same ailing old woman who used to throw refuse at him. We were taught how the Prophet honoured the agreements (Suleh Hudaibia) with his enemies, even if it meant hardships. Murder in the name of the one who pardoned his worst enemies in war makes little sense.



The attack on freedom of expression is likely to be more painful for the French who embody liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Only a week ago, we learnt from the International Federation of Journalists that Pakistan was the most dangerous place for journalists to work where 14 journalists lost their lives in 2014.
A single attack in Paris has killed several journalists in the heart of Europe and at the hands of Muslims. No amount of scapegoating by Muslims will succeed in shifting the blame to a ‘misguided minority’ among the larger Muslim body politic.

It would be naïve to assume that those who marched in support of Muslims against the rightwing extremists in Germany were unaware of the threats posed by the Islamic extremists. A Pew Research Global Attitudes poll in Spring 2013 revealed that 95 per cent of Germans considered Islamic extremists a threat to their country.

Still, when racist elements pushed against Muslims and immigrants, ordinary Germans marched in solidarity with Muslims.

At the same time, 94 per cent of French and 88 per cent of the British felt the same about Islamic extremists.
Despite these reservations, European Muslims do live freely and pursue successful careers in academia, government, and the industry.

 This is not to deny the racial biases in Europe, but, is Pakistan or other Muslim nations free of such biases where ethnic, sectarian, and religious minorities face open discrimination?

The massacres in Peshawar and Paris, and the daily bombings in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq must provide the impetus for a tolerant and forgiving Islam to emerge in Muslim societies, where the majority needs to shun its justifications or silence, and loudly refuse to tolerate killing in the name of Islam.

12 Dead In Shooting At Paris Offices Of Satirical Magazine

A video image circulating on Facebook and YouTube, showing two gunmen on a road near the Paris offices. -Photo Public Domain

PARIS: Two brothers suspected of having gunned down 12 people in an Islamist attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were spotted Thursday morning and are armed, sources close to the manhunt said.

The manager of a petrol station near Villers-Cotteret in the northern Aisne region “recognised the two men suspected of having participated in the attack against Charlie Hebdo”, the source said.

French Police, earlier on Thursday, identified three men, including two brothers, as suspects in the attack at the offices of weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, as security officers fanned out around the Paris region in a manhunt.

Armed gunmen face police officers near the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015, during an attack on the offices of the newspaper which left eleven dead, including two police officers, according to sources close to the investigation. —AFP

One police official said the men had links to a Yemeni terrorist network. Witnesses of the attackers' escape through Paris said one claimed allegiance to al Qaeda in Yemen.

Two police officials named the three suspects as Frenchmen Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, who are brothers and in their early 30s, as well as 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorised to publicly discuss the sensitive and ongoing investigation.

Cherif Kouachi was convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency, and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

During his 2008 trial, he told the court he was motivated by his outrage at television images of torture of Iraqi inmates at the US prison at Abu Ghraib.

Hooded gunmen stormed the Paris offices of a weekly satirical magazine, killing at least 12 people, including two police officers in the worst militant attack on French soil in recent decades.
Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) is well known for courting controversy with satirical attacks on political and religious leaders.

Victims included four prominent cartoonists, among them the editor-in-chief, Stephane Charbonnier, who had lived under police protection for years after receiving death threats.

The chief editor was holding a morning meeting when the assailants armed with Kalashnikovs burst in and opened fire. The three other cartoonists who died were Jean Cabut, Georges Wolinski and Bernard Verlhac.
Two assailants were captured on video calmly leaving the scene after the shooting. A police union official said the assailants remained at liberty and there were fears of further attacks.

France Info radio said police had confirmed 10 injured. Police informed Reuters that of the 10 wounded, five were injured critically.

There were no immediate arrests and no immediate claim of responsibility for the shootings.

A tweeter from al Qaeda's Yemeni branch, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who communicated Wednesday with The Associated Press, said the group is not claiming responsibility, but said it might have inspired the attack.

The satirical newspaper gained notoriety in Feb 2006 when it reprinted sacrilegious cartoons that had originally appeared in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. The cartoons set off a wave of violence in the Middle East which claimed 50 lives.

A firebomb attack gutted the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo in November 2011 after it put an image of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) on its cover.