Amedy_Coulibaly

Amedy Coulibaly

Amedy Coulibaly

Malian-French prime suspect in the Montrouge shooting

Amedy Coulibaly (French pronunciation: [amɛdi kulibali]; 27 February 1982 – 9 January 2015) was a Malian-French man who was the prime suspect in the Montrouge shooting, in which municipal police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe was shot and killed, and was the hostage-taker and gunman in the Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege, in which he killed four hostages before being fatally shot by police.

Quick Facts Born, Died ...

He was a close friend of Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo shooting, to which Coulibaly's shootings were connected. He said he synchronized his attacks with the Kouachi brothers.[7][8] Coulibaly had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.[9]

Early life

Coulibaly grew up on La Grande Borne housing estate.

Coulibaly was born in Juvisy-sur-Orge, a suburb south-east of Paris, into a Malian Muslim immigrant family.[10][11] He was the only boy, with nine sisters. He grew up on a housing estate, La Grande Borne, in Grigny, south of Paris.[12]

Starting at the age of 17, he was convicted five times for armed robbery and at least once for drug trafficking.[11][13] A report by a psychiatric expert prepared for a Parisian court found Coulibaly had an "immature and psychopathic personality" and "poor powers of introspection."[14]

Activities prior to 2015 shootings

In 2004, Coulibaly was sentenced to six years in Fleury-Mérogis Prison for armed bank robbery.[13] There, he met Chérif Kouachi. He is believed to have converted to radical Islam in prison at the same time as Chérif.[15] In prison he also met al-Qaeda recruiter Djamel Beghal, who was in "isolation" in the cell above him but whom he was nevertheless able to communicate with.[16] He later said that his discovery of Islam in prison changed him.[17]

In 2007, he met and began dating Hayat Boumeddiene. On 5 July 2009, they got married in an Islamic religious ceremony.[13][18][19] Boumeddiene's father stood in for her at the marriage service.[13] On 15 July 2009, while involved in an effort promoting youth employment, Coulibaly, along with about 500 others, met with then-President Nicolas Sarkozy.[20]

A source stated that Coulibaly "was friends of both of" the Kouachi brothers, and that he had first met Cherif in prison.[21][22] Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers were known members of the "Buttes-Chaumont network" [fr]. The name comes from the nearby Parc des Buttes Chaumont, where they often met and performed military-style training exercises with other French-Algerian extremists.[23][24][25] Coulibaly is believed to have been radicalised by an Islamic preacher in Paris, and had expressed a desire to fight in either Iraq or Syria.[26]

Ten months after his meeting with Sarkozy, in May 2010 police arrested him and searched his apartment. They found ammunition, a crossbow, and letters seeking false official documents.[13][27] Coulibaly maintained that he was planning to sell the ammunition on the street.[15] In December 2013 he was sentenced to five years in prison for supplying ammunition for a plot to break out from prison radical French-Algerian Islamist Smain Ait Ali Belkacem (who had planned the 1995 Paris Métro and RER bombings),[28][29][30] a plot in which the Kouachi brothers were also involved.[22] However, Coulibaly was released early from Villepinte prison outside Paris, in March 2014.[31][32][33] He was required to wear an electronic bracelet until May 2014.[29]

In October 2014, he and Boumeddiene went to perform the Hajj in Mecca, the pilgrimage obligatory for every Muslim who is able to do so.[13][18]

A week before the attacks, on 4 January 2015 Coulibaly rented a house in Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, in the southern Paris suburbs. There, after the attacks, police discovered automatic weapons, a grenade launcher, smoke grenades and bombs, handguns, industrial explosives, and flags of the Islamic State.[30][34][35]

He had pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, as he put it, "as soon as the caliphate was declared," which was in the summer of 2014.[30] He stated this, and described how he and the Kouachi brothers had synchronized their attacks and were "a team, in league together," in a video posted on Twitter days after he and the brothers were killed.[7][9][30][36][37][38] Text in the video states that Coulibaly had killed a policewoman and "five Jews."[38] The video captions him with the names "Amedy Coulibaly" and "Abou Bassir Abdallah al-Ifriqi."[7] As the video includes news reports of his attack on the kosher supermarket, it was edited by someone after he was killed.[39]

Shootings on 7–9 January 2015

See also: Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege and January 2015 Île-de-France attacks § Fontenay-aux-Roses and Montrouge shootings

Coulibaly said he synchronized his attacks with the Kouachi brothers.[7] In the shootings, five people were killed and eleven others were wounded.

The first shooting was of a jogger who was wounded on the evening of 7 January in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Shell casings found at the scene were later linked to the weapon carried by Coulibaly in his kosher supermarket attack.[7] However, the jogger refuted Coulibaly's involvement and recognized Amar Ramdani, a friend of Coulibaly, as the gunman.[40]

The second shooting occurred in Montrouge on 8 January. Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a policewoman, was killed, and a street sweeper was critically injured. DNA found at the scene was a match to Coulibaly.[1][7][41]

The third shooting took place at Porte de Vincennes, east Paris, on 9 January. Coulibaly killed four more people, all Jewish patrons at a Jewish Hypercacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes, at the outset of an hours-long siege in which he demanded that the Kouachi brothers be freed.[6][8][37][42][43][44][45][46] At the outset of that attack, he introduced himself to his hostages, saying: "I am Amedy Coulibaly, Malian and Muslim. I belong to the Islamic State."[47] French commandos stormed the store, and killed Coulibaly.[41] A Nagant M1895 revolver was also found in the possession of Coulibaly.[48]

Aftermath

After Mali refused to accept Coulibaly's body for burial, he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Muslim section of a cemetery in Thiais.[1]

His wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, is currently being sought by French police as a suspected accomplice of Coulibaly, alleged to have helped him commit his attacks. She arrived in Turkey five days before the attacks.[49] She has been described by newspapers as "France's most wanted woman." She was last tracked on 10 January 2015 to the Islamic State-controlled border town of Tell Abyad in Syria. In early March 2019, Dorothee Maquere – wife of French jihadist Fabien Clain – claimed that Boumeddiene was killed during the Battle of Baghuz Fawqani due to injuries sustained from an airstrike on her safehouse.[50]

In March 2020, a French jihadist woman told a judge that she met Boumeddiene in October 2019 at the Al Howl camp; Boumeddiene was staying under a false identity and managed to escape.[51] French intelligence services think that this piece of information is plausible.

See also

References

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