Amedy Coulibaly
Malian-French prime suspect in the Montrouge shooting From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Malian-French prime suspect in the Montrouge shooting From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amedy Coulibaly (French pronunciation: [amɛdi kulibali]; 27 February 1982 – 9 January 2015), also known by the nom de guerre (kunya) Abu Basir al-Ifriqi (Arabic: أبو بصير الإفريقي)[7] 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.
Amedy Coulibaly | |
|---|---|
| |
| Born | 27 February 1982 Juvisy-sur-Orge, Essonne, France |
| Died | 9 January 2015 (aged 32) Paris, France |
| Cause of death | Ballistic trauma |
| Resting place | In Muslim section of cemetery in Thiais, France[1] |
| Nationality | French |
| Other names | Abu Basir al-Ifriqi Abou Bassir Abdallah al-Ifriqi Doly Gringy[2] |
| Occupation(s) | Unemployed; previously Coca-Cola worker[3] |
| Known for | |
| Criminal status | Convicted; Released early, in March 2014 |
| Spouse | Hayat Boumeddiene |
| Allegiance |  Islamic State |
| Criminal charge | Robbery, drug trafficking, assisting plot to break out Islamist terrorist from prison (December 2013) |
| Penalty | Five years in prison |
Capture status | Killed |
| Partner(s) | Saïd and Chérif Kouachi |
| Details | |
| Date | 8–9 January 2015 |
| Location(s) | |
| Target(s) |
|
| Killed | 5 |
| Injured | 10 |
| Weapons |
|
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.[8][9] Coulibaly had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.[10]
Coulibaly was born in Juvisy-sur-Orge, a suburb south-east of Paris, into a Malian Muslim immigrant family.[11][12] He was the only boy, with nine sisters. He grew up on a housing estate, La Grande Borne, in Grigny, south of Paris.[13]
Starting at the age of 17, he was convicted five times for armed robbery and at least once for drug trafficking.[12][14] A report by a psychiatric expert prepared for a Parisian court found Coulibaly had an "immature and psychopathic personality" and "poor powers of introspection."[15]
In 2004, Coulibaly was sentenced to six years in Fleury-Mérogis Prison for armed bank robbery.[14] There, he met Chérif Kouachi. He is believed to have converted to radical Islam in prison at the same time as Chérif.[16] 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.[17] He later said that his discovery of Islam in prison changed him.[18]
In 2007, he met and began dating Hayat Boumeddiene. On 5 July 2009, they got married in an Islamic religious ceremony.[14][19][20] Boumeddiene's father stood in for her at the marriage service.[14] On 15 July 2009, while involved in an effort promoting youth employment, Coulibaly, along with about 500 others, met with then-President Nicolas Sarkozy.[21]
A source stated that Coulibaly "was friends of both of" the Kouachi brothers, and that he had first met Cherif in prison.[22][23] Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers were known members of the "Buttes-Chaumont network". 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.[24][25][26] 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.[27]
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.[14][28] Coulibaly maintained that he was planning to sell the ammunition on the street.[16] 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),[29][30][31] a plot in which the Kouachi brothers were also involved.[23] However, Coulibaly was released early from Villepinte prison outside Paris, in March 2014.[32][33][34] He was required to wear an electronic bracelet until May 2014.[30]
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.[14][19]
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.[31][35][36]
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.[31] 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.[8][10][31][37][38][39] Text in the video states that Coulibaly had killed a policewoman and "five Jews."[39] The video captions him with the names "Amedy Coulibaly" and "Abou Bassir Abdallah al-Ifriqi."[8] As the video includes news reports of his attack on the kosher supermarket, it was edited by someone after he was killed.[40]
Coulibaly said he synchronized his attacks with the Kouachi brothers.[8] 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.[8] However, the jogger refuted Coulibaly's involvement and recognized Amar Ramdani, a friend of Coulibaly, as the gunman.[41]
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][8][42]
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][9][38][43][44][45][46][47] 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."[48] French commandos stormed the store, and killed Coulibaly.[42] A Nagant M1895 revolver was also found in the possession of Coulibaly.[49]
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.[50] 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.[51]
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.[52] French intelligence services think that this piece of information is plausible.
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