Amedy Coulibaly (French pronunciation:[amɛdikulibali]; 27 February 1982 – 9 January 2015) was a
Malian-French man who was the prime suspect in the
Montrouge shooting, in which
municipal police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe was shot and killed, and was the hostage-taker and gunman in the
Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege, in which he killed four hostages before being fatally shot by police.
Coulibaly was born in
Juvisy-sur-Orge, a suburb south-east of Paris, into a
Malian Muslim immigrant family.[10][11] He was the only boy, with nine sisters. He grew up on a housing estate,
La Grande Borne, in
Grigny, south of Paris.[12]
Starting at the age of 17, he was convicted five times for armed robbery and at least once for drug trafficking.[11][13] A report by a psychiatric expert prepared for a Parisian court found Coulibaly had an "immature and
psychopathic personality" and "poor powers of introspection."[14]
Activities prior to 2015 shootings
In 2004, Coulibaly was sentenced to six years in
Fleury-Mérogis Prison for armed bank robbery.[13] There, he met
Chérif Kouachi. He is believed to have
converted to radical Islam in prison at the same time as Chérif.[15] In prison he also met al-Qaeda recruiter
Djamel Beghal, who was in "isolation" in the cell above him but whom he was nevertheless able to communicate with.[16] He later said that his discovery of Islam in prison changed him.[17]
In 2007, he met and began dating
Hayat Boumeddiene. On 5 July 2009, they got married in an
Islamic religious ceremony.[13][18][19] Boumeddiene's father stood in for her at the marriage service.[13] On 15 July 2009, while involved in an effort promoting youth employment, Coulibaly, along with about 500 others, met with then-President
Nicolas Sarkozy.[20]
A source stated that Coulibaly "was friends of both of" the Kouachi brothers, and that he had first met Cherif in prison.[21][22] Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers were known members of the
"Buttes-Chaumont network" [
fr]. The name comes from the nearby
Parc des Buttes Chaumont, where they often met and performed military-style training exercises with other French-Algerian extremists.[23][24][25] Coulibaly is believed to have been radicalised by an Islamic preacher in Paris, and had expressed a desire to fight in either Iraq or Syria.[26]
Ten months after his meeting with Sarkozy, in May 2010 police arrested him and searched his apartment. They found ammunition, a crossbow, and letters seeking false official documents.[13][27] Coulibaly maintained that he was planning to sell the ammunition on the street.[15] In December 2013 he was sentenced to five years in prison for supplying ammunition for a plot to break out from prison radical French-Algerian Islamist Smain Ait Ali Belkacem (who had planned the
1995 Paris Métro and RER bombings),[28][29][30] a plot in which the Kouachi brothers were also involved.[22] However, Coulibaly was released early from
Villepinte prison outside Paris, in March 2014.[31][32][33] He was required to wear an
electronic bracelet until May 2014.[29]
In October 2014, he and Boumeddiene went to perform the
Hajj in
Mecca, the pilgrimage obligatory for every Muslim who is able to do so.[13][18]
A week before the attacks, on 4 January 2015 Coulibaly rented a house in
Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, in the southern Paris suburbs. There, after the attacks, police discovered automatic weapons, a grenade launcher, smoke grenades and bombs, handguns, industrial explosives, and flags of the Islamic State.[30][34][35]
He had pledged allegiance to
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the
Islamic State, as he put it, "as soon as the caliphate was declared," which was in the summer of 2014.[30] He stated this, and described how he and the Kouachi brothers had synchronized their attacks and were "a team, in league together," in a video posted on Twitter days after he and the brothers were killed.[7][9][30][36][37][38] Text in the video states that Coulibaly had killed a policewoman and "five Jews."[38] The video captions him with the names "Amedy Coulibaly" and "Abou Bassir Abdallah al-Ifriqi."[7] As the video includes news reports of his attack on the kosher supermarket, it was edited by someone after he was killed.[39]
Coulibaly said he synchronized his attacks with the Kouachi brothers.[7] In the shootings, five people were killed and eleven others were wounded.
The first shooting was of a jogger who was wounded on the evening of 7 January in
Fontenay-aux-Roses. Shell casings found at the scene were later linked to the weapon carried by Coulibaly in his kosher supermarket attack.[7] However, the jogger refuted Coulibaly's involvement and recognized Amar Ramdani, a friend of Coulibaly, as the gunman.[40]
The second shooting occurred in
Montrouge on 8 January. Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a policewoman, was killed, and a street sweeper was critically injured. DNA found at the scene was a match to Coulibaly.[4][7][41]
The third shooting took place at
Porte de Vincennes, east Paris, on 9 January. Coulibaly killed four more people, all Jewish patrons at a Jewish
Hypercacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes, at the outset of an hours-long siege in which he demanded that the Kouachi brothers be freed.[3][8][37][42][43][44][45][46] At the outset of that attack, he introduced himself to his hostages, saying: "I am Amedy Coulibaly, Malian and Muslim. I belong to the Islamic State."[47] French commandos stormed the store, and killed Coulibaly.[41] A
Nagant M1895 revolver was also found in the possession of Coulibaly.[48]
Aftermath
After
Mali refused to accept Coulibaly's body for burial, he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Muslim section of a cemetery in
Thiais.[4]
His wife,
Hayat Boumeddiene, is currently being sought by French police as a suspected accomplice of Coulibaly, alleged to have helped him commit his attacks. She arrived in Turkey five days before the attacks.[49] She has been described by newspapers as "France's most wanted woman." She was last tracked on 10 January 2015 to the
Islamic State-controlled border town of
Tell Abyad in Syria. In early March 2019, Dorothee Maquere – wife of French jihadist
Fabien Clain – claimed that Boumeddiene was killed during the
Battle of Baghuz Fawqani due to injuries sustained from an airstrike on her safehouse.[50]
In March 2020, a French jihadist woman told a judge that she met Boumeddiene in October 2019 at the
Al Howl camp; Boumeddiene was staying under a false identity and managed to escape.[51] French intelligence services think that this piece of information is plausible.
^Bisserbe, Noémie (31 July 2016).
"European Prisons Fueling Spread of Islamic Radicalism". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 1 August 2016. 'Prison changed me,' Coulibaly would later tell French journalist Warda Mohamed after his release in 2008. Ms. Mohamed, a French journalist who interviewed Coulibaly as part of a documentary on prison life, said she didn't publish the comments at the time. 'I learnt about Islam in prison. Before that I wasn't interested, now I pray,' Coulibaly told Ms. Mohamed, she said.