Wife of kosher supermarket terrorist said spotted in ISIS video
Reports say French authorities looking into suspicions that Hayat Boumeddiene, wife of terrorist Amedy Coulibaly, has been spotted in ISIS promo video called ‘Blow up France 2’.
French authorities are reportedly examining suspicions that Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist behind the attack on a kosher supermarket in the outskirts of Paris, has appeared in a video released by the Islamic State group.
According to a report by CNN, Boumeddiene seems to appear in the video, dubbed “Blow up France 2”, wearing camouflage and holding arms together with other group fighters.
The video was released Tuesday and shows an ISIS fighter praising the January attacks in France which killed 17 people and three terrorists, in an attack on the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine and in a Paris kosher supermarket. In the video, the speaker calls for new attacks in France.
"French authorities are investigating the possibility this woman could be Hayat Boumeddiene," a source told CNN after the video went public.
The 26-year-old is partner to Amedy Coulibaly, one of the three gunmen shot dead by police after three days of mayhem in France. Police suspect she might have had a hand in Coulibaly's supermarket hostage-taking.
She had a religious ceremony in 2009 to "marry" Coulibaly, though such unions are not recognized in France unless preceded by a civil ceremony conducted by local officials, and the couple lived in a modest apartment in a poor suburb south of Paris.
Le Parisien newspaper said she lost her job as a cashier because she insisted on wearing top-to-toe Islamic wear known as a niqab.
Boumeddiene accompanied Coulibaly several times to a forest in central southern France to fire a crossbow. Le Monde published several photos of the couple holding up the weapon, with Boumeddiene wearing her niqab.
Boumeddiene fled Paris before the attacks and is wanted for questioning as a possible accomplice. She was in Turkey five days before the killings and then crossed into Syria on Jan. 8, Turkish officials said.
Footage from security cameras posted on the HaberTurk news website showed a woman it identified as Boumeddiene walking with a man to passport control at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen Airport after flying in from Madrid.
The woman is wearing a long dress and winter coat and her head is covered with a white head scarf. Her companion has a short pony tail. She is seen briefly conversing with a Turkish immigration officer before the undated footage ends.
An official French police photograph shows Boumeddiene as a young woman with long dark hair hitched back over her ears. French media released photos purporting to be of a fully-veiled Boumeddiene, posing with a cross-bow, in what they said was a 2010 training session in the mountainous Cantal region.
French media described her as one of seven children whose mother died when she was young and whose delivery-man father struggled to keep working while looking after the family.
Rachel Cadars and Reuters contributed to this report
