Two days after the dramatic and tragic events from Friday, Amedy Coulibaly, who in coordination with the two brothers who attacked a satirical newspaper and said they were affiliated with al-Qaeda, killed four hostages at a Paris supermarket Friday before he was slain by police appeared in a new posthumous video released on Sunday, on which he pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group and explained the planning and the reasoning behind the attacks that sowed terror across France.
According to WaPo [8]"the video pointed to the dangers, long anticipated by law enforcement, posed by the expanding allure of the group that has conquered vast areas of Iraq and Syria over the past two years, even as al-Qaeda continues to pursue its own agenda of staging attacks against the West. The video offered no evidence, however, that Coulibaly had been in contact with the Islamic State before his assault on the supermarket, which may represent another example of the “lone wolf” attacks that the Islamic State has inspired, analysts said."
As Breaking 911 adds [9], "filmed over several days and edited after the attacks, the video shows Amedy Coulibaly displaying a small arsenal of weapons, doing pushups and pullups in a drab courtyard and, in broken Arabic, giving fealty to IS militants. The video appeared Sunday on militant websites, and two men who dealt drugs with Coulibaly confirmed his identify to The Associated Press."
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Coulibaly cited the airstrikes carried out against the Islamic State by the U.S.-led coalition, in which France participates, as one of the motives for his assault on the supermarket, which came two days after two brothers, Said and Chérif Kouachi, stormed the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people.
“You attack the Islamic State. We attack you,” he said, speaking in French and occasionally lapsing into broken Arabic, in a segment of the recording that showed him wearing a leather jacket and wool cap, seated beside an AK-47 automatic rifle. “You and your coalition, so that you who are almost in the lead now, you bombard there regularly,” he said. “You kill civilians, you kill combatants, you kill.”
Other segments showed him wearing Arab and African robes and a flak vest, suggesting they were recorded at different times, though all appeared to have been filmed in the same place. The furnishings and stripped hardwood floors suggest an apartment in France.
At least one segment, which refers to the Charlie Hebdo attack, was likely recorded in the two days that elapsed between the attacks, and the video begins and ends with footage of police bursting into the supermarket and shooting Coulibaly.
The video lacked the sophisticated editing techniques typically associated with Islamic State videos, and French authorities have not indicated that Coulibaly was among the more than 700 French citizens who are thought to have traveled to Syria to fight.
The video was first posted by an obscure jihadist account on Twitter, rather than the Islamic State’s official forums, according to Aaron Zelin, an expert in jihadist movements at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. That gives no reason to believe Coulibaly had been directed to act by the Islamic State, only that he was connected to a wider network of jihadists who sympathize, support and perhaps dispatch volunteers to fight for the organization, he said.
The video is below:
Curious, Coulibaly’s wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, who is wanted by the French authorities, was reported by French and Turkish officials to have traveled to Turkey and then across the border into Syria in the days immediately preceding the attacks. She had participated in more than 500 telephone calls with the wife of Chérif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, suggesting the attackers all knew one another.
What is odd is that according to the latest news, despite reports that she participated in the deli store shootout, she was not in France [10]when the attack took place: The French female terror suspect on the run is no longer in France and appears to have left before this week's terror attacks struck that nation. A Turkish intelligence official told the Associated Press on Saturday that a woman with the same name and resembling a widely distributed photo of Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, flew to Istanbul on Jan. 2. Authorities believe she traveled to Sanliurfa near the Syrian border on Jan. 4, then disappeared. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to the AP because he wasn't authorized to speak on the record.
Which means that whoever got away from the French police, if preliminary accounts of two attackers are correct, is not only not identified but still on the loose.
