Amedy Coulibaly
A video emerged Sunday purporting to show the gunman who killed a French policewoman and four hostages at a kosher grocery, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group and defending the attacks on the satirical newspaper and the Jewish store.
The SITE Intelligence Group said it had verified the video, which shows a man resembling Amedy Coulibaly with a gun, exercising and giving speeches in front of an Islamic State emblem. He defends the attacks carried out on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, police and the Jewish store.
“What we are doing is completely legitimate, given what they are doing,” Coulibaly told the camera in fluent French. “You cannot attack and not expect retribution so you are playing the victim as if you don’t understand what’s happening.”
Coulibaly took over the kosher grocery, demanding freedom for the brothers who carried out the massacre at newspaper Charlie Hebdo. At the time, the brothers were trapped in a printing house near Charles de Gaulle airport.
All three men were killed in nearly simultaneous raids by security forces.
Five people detained in connection with the three days of bloodshed in France were released from custody, the Paris prosecutor’s spokeswoman said earlier yesterday. Family members of the attackers have been given preliminary charges, but prosecutor’s spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre said no one remained in detention yesterday over the attacks that left 17 people dead.
Coulibaly’s widow, who has been named as an accomplice, is believed to have traveled to a Turkish city near the Syrian border and then all traces of her were lost, according to a Turkish intelligence official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi methodically massacred 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices, led police on a chase for two days and were then cornered Friday at a printing house near Charles de Gaulle Airport. Separately, Coulibaly shot a policewoman to death and attacked the Paris kosher market, threatening more violence unless police let the Kouachis go. Four hostages died.
At the end of the video Coulibaly calls for others to carry out similar attacks.
In Germany, arsonists early Sunday attacked a newspaper that republished Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons. Two men were detained. No one was hurt in the fire, but the newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost said several files in its archives were destroyed. Lori Hinnat, Paris, AP
prosecutor: grocery gunman linked to 3rd shooting
A prosecutor says the shooting of a jogger in a Paris suburb on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre has been linked to the gunman who killed a policewoman and four hostages at a kosher grocery.
In a brief statement yesterday, the prosecutor said ballistics tests on shell cases from the shooting Wednesday in Fontenay aux Roses linked them to the automatic weapon at the kosher store stormed two days later. The prosecutor said the jogger was seriously wounded.
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