14.50 French police have released mugshots of Amedy Coulibaly and Hayat Boumeddiene, in connection with yesterday morning's murder of a policewoman in southwestern Paris. Coulibaly is now believed to be the gunman at the grocery in eastern Paris's Port de Vincennes.
The Telegraph's Henry Samuel explains the suspects' backgrounds:
Coulbaly, a Frenchman of Senegalese descent from Juvisy in the Essonne area outside Paris, was part of the now notorious Buttes-Chaumont network that sought to recruit and sent radicalised French youths to Iraq in the early 2000s.
The Koachi brothers were also part of the network, based in Paris’ 19th arrondissement.
One of 10 children and the only boy, Coulibaly became a delinquent at 17, and a repeat offender for petty thefts and drugs crimes, moving onto an armed bank robbery in September 2002 in Orleans, in the Loiret, before radicalising.
In 2013, he was convicted to five years in prison for his involvement in a botched prison break-out of Smain Ali Belkacem, a former member of the Algerian Islamist group GIA and the author of a 1995 attack on the Paris transport system that killed eight people and wounded 117.
The Koachi brothers were arrested and detained for involvement in the Belkacem breakout, but later released due to lack of evidence.
According to Le Monde, the Coulbaly and Boumeddiene were already in a relationship in 2010, when he was arrested over the jailbreak attempt. She reportedly waited for her boyfriend to be released from prison this Spring after four years in detention, and he lived with her after that in a Paris suburb.
The pair reportedly visited Beghal in 2010 in Cantal, southern France, where he was under house arrest. That year, French surveillance officers photographed Beghal playing football with Cherif Kouachi and two other convicted terrorists, Ahmed Laidouni, a jihadi recruiter, and Farid Melouk, an Algerian member of the GIA terror group.
Quizzed by French intelligence agents at the time, Boumeddiene told them that she and Coulbaly had gone there to practice “crossbow shooting”
