Posted on 01/09/2015 9:54:50 PM PST by canuck_conservative
The 27-year-old man photographed in 2009 seemed to represent hope springing from Paris’s desperate suburbs. Part of a work-insertion program, he was about to meet then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who was trying to combat high youth unemployment....
The man was Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed Friday after seizing hostages in a Jewish supermarket in Paris, an attack he claimed was in support of the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham. A close associate of Said and Chérif Kouachi, the two brothers who attacked the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo Wednesday, Coulibaly is a symbol of the huge challenges lying ahead for France....
Coulibaly befriended Chérif Kouachi around 2005 when they were imprisoned in Fleury-Mérogis, south of Paris. Kouachi had been arrested as he prepared to leave for Iraq to join insurgents battling U.S. forces.
In prison they met Djamel Beghal, who was serving a sentence for a plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris. Beghal would become something of a mentor, and in 2010 all three were arrested for a plot to break another jihadi, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, out of prison....
In 2013, Manuel Valls, French interior minister at the time, spoke of the “enemy within” after it emerged Mohamed Merah, who killed four Jews and three soldiers in Toulouse in 2012 before being shot by police, had become radicalized while jailed for theft.
“They start with petty crime, move on to drug trafficking, sometimes prison, leading to conversion to radical Islam and hatred for the West,” Mr. Valls, now prime minister, told Le Parisien. “There are several dozen Merahs in France today. Not all of them take action, but we have to guard against it.”....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalpost.com ...
Deport the Camel humpers. The Saudi empty quarter needs settlement.
” Still sticks in my craw every time I remember a certain someone telling the Tea Party McCain was one with them.”
Yeah..
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