One of the men behind last week's deadly rampage in Paris claimed to have lived with the Nigerian behind the failed al-Qaida "underwear bomb" plot five years ago, a Yemeni reporter who met the Paris attacker said Monday. Journalist and researcher Mohammed al-Kibsi said he first met Said Kouachi in 2010 while the French citizen was studying Arabic in the capital Sanaa, in the days after the failed Christmas 2009 attack on a Detroit-bound airliner.
"When I saw the photo of Said I could recognize him... He was very polite and had a sense of humor, so for me I could not expect that a few years later he would be the suspect of a terror attack," al-Kibsi said by telephone. "When I first met him he was wearing a track suit, playing football with kids in the street."