The two French brothers wanted in the newspaper office bloodbath in Paris were already known to US authorities and had been put on the American no-fly list, a senior US counter-terrorism official said yesterday.
Another US official said the older brother, Said Kouachi, had travelled to Yemen. It was unclear whether he was there to join up with extremist groups such as Al Qaeda.
The details emerged as French authorities conducted an all-out manhunt for the Kouachi brothers Cherif, 32, and Said, 34 in the terror attack Wednesday that killed 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly that lampooned radical Islam.
They were identified as suspects after the older brother’s ID card was found in the getaway car, authorities said. Witnesses said the gunmen in the attack claimed allegiance to Al Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen.
Both Kouachi brothers the Paris-born offspring of Algerian parents were already known to French counterterrorism authorities.
Cherif, a former pizza deliveryman, had appeared in a 2005 French TV documentary on Islamic extremism and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 for trying to join up with fighters battling in Iraq.
The US no-fly list includes known or suspected terrorists and extremists.The US officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss foreign intelligence publicly.
A French security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that American authorities had shared intelligence with France indicating that Said had travelled to Yemen several years ago for training. French authorities were seeking to verify the information, the official said.
Cherif Kouachi chased girls and belted out rap lyrics in his rough-and-tumble Paris neighbourhood before the words of a firebrand Muslim cleric persuaded him to book a flight to Syria to wage holy war.
The cleric “told me that (holy) texts prove the benefits of suicide attacks,” Kouachi was quoted as saying in the TV documentary. “It’s written in the texts that it’s good to die as a martyr.”
He was described at the time as a reluctant holy warrior, relieved to have been stopped by French counterespionage officials from taking a Syria-bound flight that was ultimately supposed to lead him to the battlefields of Iraq.
Imprisonment changed him, his former attorney Vincent Ollivier told Le Parisien newspaper in a story published Thursday.
After he got out of prison, police detained him again in 2010 in an investigation of an alleged plot to free an militant sentenced to life in prison for bombing a Paris train line. Kouachi was ultimately released with no charges ever brought.
Much less has become public about Said, but Cazeneuve said the jobless resident of the city of Reims was also known to authorities, despite having never been prosecuted, because he was “on the periphery” of his brother’s illegal activities.
In Reims, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) northeast of Paris, Said frequented a prayer room on the ground floor of an apartment building, according to the local imam, Abdul-Hamid al-Khalifa.
Al-Khalifa told the press that Said wore traditional North Africa clothes to prayers and didn’t mix much if at all with other worshippers. “Typically, he’d come late to prayers and leave right when they were done,”Al-Khalifa said in a telephone interview.
