Hayat Boumeddiene: France’s most-wanted woman and her path to jihadism

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Hayat Boumeddiene: France’s most-wanted woman and her path to jihadism

Hayat Boumeddiene, wife of Paris kosher store attacker Amedy Coulibaly, remains on the run in Syria and is a key target for investigators

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 03 February, 2015, 10:03pm
UPDATED : Tuesday, 03 February, 2015, 10:04pm

The Washington Post in Paris

Hayat Boumeddiene (left) with husband Amedy Coulibaly and (right) in a veil. Photo: SCMP Pictures

France's most-wanted woman once loved the warm waves of the Dominican Republic, posing in a black bikini with her future husband, a petty thief.

As her faith deepened, she exchanged the bathing suits for headscarfs and mosques in Malaysia, a pilgrimage to Mecca, and now, authorities say, the jihadist cauldron of Syria.

Hayat Boumeddiene said she lived to travel; now she is on the run. She fled to the Islamic State the day before her husband attacked a kosher supermarket in Paris, investigators say.

With the three Paris attackers dead, Boumeddiene, a 26-year-old native, is emerging as a key target for investigators, who think she knows crucial details about the planning of the three days of violence that terrorised France, claiming 17 victims.

Understanding Boumeddiene's radicalisation is especially valuable, authorities say, since they believe women are increasingly becoming the backbone of such plots. A jihadist text written by a prominent Belgian woman with ties to al-Qaeda, Malika El Aroud, was found among Boumeddiene's possessions after she disappeared.

Much remains unclear about Boumeddiene's role in the Paris attacks. But she fled France days before the violence, and authorities believe she played a key role passing messages as the plot took shape.

Records show more than 500 calls in 2014 between her phone and that of the wife of Cherif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who attacked the satirical newsweekly Charlie Hebdo.

Boumeddiene's troubles started when she was eight, when her mother died suddenly from a heart ailment, family friends say. Her father quickly remarried. The new wife clashed with her six stepchildren, including Boumeddiene, who was placed in a group home, then, at 13, with a family from the same Algerian city as her father.

"This girl didn't grow up in my house. She grew up in the house of nonbelievers," said Boumeddiene's father, Mohamed Boumeddiene, reached by phone in Algeria, where he travelled after the attacks. "She made all these decisions on her own."

Boumeddiene favoured makeup from Sephora and rambling phone calls with her friends, said Omar, her foster brother, who spoke on the condition his family name not be published. "She was fragile," he said, and shaken by her mother's death.

But she was also studious and hard-working, he said, holding down a part-time job at a newsstand in a Paris train station even as she attended classes.

When she was 18, she rejected a suitor whom her foster family found for her in Algeria and moved on her own to Paris. Within a year, a mutual acquaintance introduced her to Amedy Coulibaly.

The French native, whose parents emigrated from Mali, was fresh out of prison for armed robbery .

Neither was especially religious, but they explored their deepening Islamic faith together. In 2009, two years after they met, they married in a religious ceremony not recognised under French law.

"I had a difficult past, and this religion answered all my questions and brought me peace," Boumeddiene told police in 2010, according to a transcript of an interrogation after Coulibaly was charged with trying to break a top militant out of a French jail.

Coulibaly had found a spiritual mentor in prison, Djamel Beghal, who was convicted of plotting a 2001 attack against the US Embassy in Paris. Counterterrorism officials consider him one of al-Qaeda's top recruiters

According to her own account of trips to visit Beghal, she practiced shooting a crossbow into tree trunks. Photographs taken on one trip show her wearing a black full-faced niqab, aiming the crossbow directly at the camera.

The couple also grew close to Cherif Kouachi. Boumeddiene began a friendship with Kouachi's wife, Izzana Hamyd.

Neither Hamyd's lawyer nor Boumeddiene's former lawyer responded to repeated requests for comment. Hamyd remains free, as does the wife of the other Kouachi brother.

In October, Boumeddiene and Coulibaly went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Investigators are trying discover whether the couple met anybody with extremist links there. When she returned to France, Boumeddiene hosted a celebratory lunch for 15 of her friends at her father's apartment. "She was so peaceful," one of the friends said. But Boumeddiene left France again in late December, investigators said, eight days before the attacks began.

"We haven't seen the last of her," said Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a former top French terrorism investigator.