CHARLIE HEBDO ATTACK

Chrif Kouachi, flanked by his older brother, dressed in black, sheathed in

body armor, gave a global audience a ruthless demonstration in terrorism.
Walking with military precision into the guarded Paris offices of the satirical
newspaper Charlie Hebdo, they killed 12 people in the name of Islam. Then,
before the brothers died in a gunfight with the police, Chrif nonchalantly
took a telephone call from a reporter to make sure the world knew they
were carrying out the attack on behalf of Al Qaedas branch in Yemen.
Their story of steadily deepening radicalism occurred virtually under the
noses of French authorities, who twice had Chrif in their grasp. Chrif was
arrested in 2005, when he was no more than a fledgling jihadist, and spent
20 months in prison. There, he met and became an acolyte of Al Qaedas
top operative in France, Djamel Beghal, who had been dispatched to Paris to
set up a cell aimed at attacking United States interests. He also befriended a
convicted robber, Amedy Coulibaly, who would later synchronize his own
terrorist attack with the Kouachi brothers, killing a police officer and staging
a siege inside a kosher supermarket in the days after the Charlie Hebdo
carnage, bringing the death toll to 17.
Much remains unclear about their lives. But thousands of pages of
documents, including minutes of interrogations, summaries of phone taps,
intercepted jailhouse letters and images and religious texts found on the
laptops of Chrif Kouachi and Mr. Coulbaly, reveal an arc of radicalization
that saw them become steadily more professional and more discreet.
After one of the Kouachis traveled to Yemen in 2011, the United States
alerted French authorities. But three years of tailing the brothers yielded
nothing. They appeared so nonthreatening that surveillance was dropped in
the middle of last year, as hundreds of young Muslims cycled back and forth
to Syria for jihad and French authorities shifted priorities.
By the time the brothers burst through the heavy metal doors of Charlie
Hebdo, the newspaper that had repeatedly lampooned Muhammad, even
their relatives were shocked.
There was no sigh marking the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and death threats
were so common that the staff had become somewhat inured, even though
the newspaper had been firebombed in 2011. Entering the building required
a magnetic key. Upstairs, the office had a metal, bulletproof door that
required a code to open. The entire editorial stall met only once a week, On
Wednesdays, for approximately two hours starting at 10 a.m. The Kouachis
broke into the office on Wednesday, Jan.7, at 11:15 a.m.
They shouted for the editor, Stphane Charbonnier, known as Charb, and
gunned him down before spraying the other cartoonists around the main
conference table. A female journalist, Sigolne Vinson, tried to crawl away,
and one of the brothers addressed her: We dont kill women, he said.

The Kouachis left bodies piled on the floor, survivors crying or cowering in
fear, and then they coolly walked onto the street with one brother pumping
his weapon in the air. They shot a police officer who rushed to the scene and
then nonchalantly killed him with a bullet to the head as he lay writhing on
the sidewalk. The next day, Mr. Coulibaly wounded a city employee and
killed a police officer.
By Friday, January 9, as the police had cornered the Kouachis at a printing
factory on the outskirts of Paris, Mr. Coulibaly stormed into the Hyper Cacher
market, killing four people and taking more than a dozen people hostage. In
the hours that followed, one shopper told Le Monde that he saw the gunman
filming the scene with a camera. Later he took out the memory card,
inserted it into a laptop and appeared to edit the images. Mr. Coulibaly had
time to pray on the floor of the bloody supermarket before the police
stormed the store, pouring bullets into his chest.
At the printing factory where the Kouachis would stage their final, fatal gun
battle with the police, the owner later told reporters that he assumed he
was about to die when the two brothers first approached, bearing machine
guns and a rocket launcher. When a salesman came to the door, one of the
Kouachi brothers merely told him to go away. Leave, the brother said, like
a soldier. We dont shoot civilians.