Profiles of Paris Terrorists Links to Londonistan

News media have now identified the three terrorists who killed a dozen people in a well-organized assault on the Paris offices of the neocon satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. They are Cherif and Said Kouachi, brothers both in their mid-30s, and Hamyd Mourad, 18. Mourad turned himself in to police late on Wednesday evening, but the search is still underway for the Kouachi brothers. Mourad claims that he was in school at the time of the Paris attacks and turned himself in to avoid being killed in a police raid.

French authorities have provided some details on Cherif Kouachi, who has been on French intelligence and police radar screens since 2005, when he was detained while attempting to leave France for Syria and Iraq, to join Al Qaeda in Iraq to fight against the American occupation. He was detained in jail for a period of time, then released. He was convicted in 2008 of being part of a terrorist recruiting cell in France on behalf of AQI. Though sentenced to three years in jail, he served no time at all, according to news reports on CNN late Thursday afternoon. A judge reduced his sentence from 3 years to 18 months, and he was allowed to go free, based on time served. This lenient treatment for a member of a terrorist recruiting cell, run by a well-known jihadist preacher named Farid Benyettou, raises questions about whether the younger Kouachi brother made a deal with authorities.

But far more serious “questions” were raised by a report appearing late on Thursday in the Daily Telegraph, identifying Cherif Kouachi as a protege of Abu Hamza, the Algerian-born jihadist recruiter who operated with impunity for years out of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London. Last year Abu Hamza was convicted of terrorist activities in a Federal Court in New York. At his trial, his key defense was that he worked for MI5, while recruiting jihadists in London. He is to be sentenced soon.

Late news reports in the New York Times reported that the older brother, Said Kouachi, had been in Yemen in 2011, trained at Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula camps in small arms and unit tactics.

An American intelligence official told the Times that the brothers were on American no-fly lists for a long time.

A Washington source told EIR on Wednesday that international intelligence agencies had been caught by surprise by the Paris attacks, because there was no “chatter” on any jihadist communications links about a pending attack. However, the Times reported that a recent issue of “Inspire” magazine of AQAP had called explicitly for attacks on Western targets and had singled out Charlie Hebdo’s editor Stephane Charbonnier for attack under the headline “A Bullet a Day Keeps the Infidel Away—Defend the Prophet Muhammad.” Josh Rogin reported in Bloomberg Thursday that another jihadist website had called for attacks on the home front in a French language posting under the headline “What Are You Waiting For?”