Said Kouachi

Saïd Kouachi (undated passport photo)

Saïd Kouachi (born September 7, 1980 in Paris - † January 9, 2015 in Dammartin-en-Goële ) was a French Islamist terrorist who, together with his younger brother Chérif Kouachi, attacked the editorial team of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7th 2015 in which they murdered twelve people and injured over ten others.

youth

Saïd Kouachi was born in the 10th arrondissement of Paris and had two brothers, a sister and a half-sister. The parents came from Constantine in Algeria . In 1990 the father died of cancer and the mother had to look after her children alone. When the school grades of the older children got worse and worse and they looked increasingly neglected, the Paris youth welfare office sent the brothers Saïd and Chérif to a children's home in Treignac in the Corrèze department , where they were accepted in October 1994. The mother called her children regularly but never visited them. She had been ill for a long time and was found dead in January 1995. Saïd and Chérif spent much of their youth in the home.

The director of the home at the time and the head of the education department described Saïd (and the younger Chérif) as "perfectly integrated". They were not difficult to educate youngsters. During his stay at home, Saïd completed an apprenticeship at a hotel management school before leaving the home with his brother Chérif in 2000.

In 2001 the siblings were given to a foster family in Paris. The foster father was a French converted to Islam. As young men, Saïd and Chérif lived off odd jobs. At first they lived with an uncle who soon put them outside the door. At times the brothers lived in cheap hotels and shelters for the homeless.

Radicalization and attack

Between 2002 and 2003, the two brothers began to study Islam more closely and regularly visit the Adda'wa mosque near the Stalingrad metro station . There they came into contact with the Islamist preacher and self-appointed "emir" of the so-called Buttes-Chaumont cell ( "la filière des Buttes-Chaumont" ), the then 27-year-old Farid Benyettou. He tried to get young French people excited about jihad in Iraq and increasingly radicalized the two brothers. As part of a program against youth unemployment, Saïd got a job with the Paris city council in 2007. He was supposed to educate people about waste separation, but refused to shake hands with women on house calls, always carried a prayer rug, and insisted on retiring during prayer times. After four transfers, he was finally released.

In 2008, Saïd was arrested for belonging to the Buttes Chaumont cell, but, unlike his brother, was quickly released. In 2010 there was another police check on Saïd. Chérif was suspected of being involved in a planned liberation of the terrorist Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacems , who had been convicted of the series of attacks in France in 1995 .

According to several American media outlets, Said was said to have been to al-Qaeda training camps in Yemen in 2011 . The New York Times cites a "high-ranking representative of the US government". Saïd learned hand-to-hand combat techniques and how to handle firearms in Yemen. The local clergyman Anwar al-Awlaki called for the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists during this time . Both brothers were on the United States' no-fly list of terrorist suspects, on the general French terror watch list TIDE ( Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment ) and on the Schengen Information System. Telephone surveillance ended in 2013.

Saïd was a French citizen and lived with his wife and a small child in a three-room apartment in the Croix-Rouge district of Reims , where he regularly visited the mosque. Generally speaking, Said was seen as a quiet man who kept a distance from other believers.

On January 7, 2015, Saïd and his brother stormed the editorial team of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve people. The police found Saïd's identity card in the first escape vehicle, which led the authorities to track down the perpetrators. Two days later the brothers were arrested by the police in a printing works in Dammartin-en-Goële. Both were killed in the firefight. The accomplice of the Kouachi brothers, Amedy Coulibaly , who first murdered a policewoman and later four other people, was shot dead by security forces on the same day. Despite resistance from the local mayor, who feared a pilgrimage site for Islamists, Saïd Kouachi was buried anonymously in Reims.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} The Kouachi brothers. In: time online. January 9, 2015, accessed January 10, 2015 . 
2. ↑ Telegraph January 10, 2015: Paris shootings: Police stopped watching Said and Cherif Kouachi
3. ^ ^{A b c} Holger Dambeck, Georg Diez, Björn Hengst, Julia Amalia Heyer, Mathieu von Rohr, Simone Salden, Samiha Shafy, Holger Stark, Petra Truckendanner and Antje Windmann: " Those were good children" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 2015, p. 76–84 ( online - January 17, 2015 , here p. 78).
4. ↑ s. French Wiki: Fondation Claude-Pompidou
5. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung January 17, 2015: The Charlie Hebdo assassins. "Golden, cute and always very polite" - image + text
6. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung January 20, 2015: Youth from Chérif Kouachi in Treignac. If only he had kept playing soccer
7. ↑ Les echos January 9, 2015: Charlie Hebdo: qui sont Chérif et Saïd Kouachi?
8. ^ France 3 January 9, 2015: Chérif Kouachi et Amedy Coulibaly ont rencontré Djamel Beghal dans le Cantal in 2010
9. ↑ Chérif Kouachi jihadiste connu, son frère aîné Saïd très discret ( memento from January 26, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ), La Montagne, January 8, 2015.
10. ↑ Le Populaire January 8, 2015: Charlie Hebdo: les frères Kouachi scolarisés durant six ans en Corrèze
11. ↑ ^{a b c d} Süddeutsche Zeitung: Lost , weekend edition of January 17, 2015
12. ↑ For the professional qualifications s. Federal Ministry of Economics u. Energy: BQ portal / information portal for foreign professional qualifications / France
13. ↑ ^{a b c d} Daniel-Dylan Böhmer, Gesche Wüpper: From would-be rapper to religious fanatic. In: The world . January 8, 2015, accessed January 10, 2015 . 
14. ↑ ^{a b c} Nadia Pantel: How petty criminals became fanatical murderers. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung online. January 9, 2015, accessed January 10, 2015 . 
15. ↑ taz January 8, 2015: Two guys from the outskirts
16. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung (photo series) January 17, 2015: Farid Benyettou
17. ↑ ^{a b} Raniah Salloum: Suspects Chérif and Saïd Kouachi: Little crooks from the province. In: Spiegel Online . January 8, 2015, accessed January 10, 2015 . 
18. ↑ The Kouachi brothers have been on the US terrorist list for years. In: RP online. January 9, 2015, accessed January 9, 2015 . 
19. ^ Assassin Saïd Kouachi buried in Reims. In: Spiegel Online from January 17, 2015 (accessed January 17, 2015).