Paris, Jan 11 AFP : French forces were frantically hunting for the girlfriend of an Islamist gunman as the country mourned 17 dead in three blood-soaked days that has shaken the nation.
After President Francois Hollande warned the threats facing France “weren’t over” and Islamist groups issued chilling warnings of fresh attacks, authorities began to pursue Hayat Boumeddiene, believing that the 26-year-old, who was romantically involved with slain hostage-taker Amedy Coulibaly, took part in the murder of a policewoman on Thursday.
The police also suspected that she might have had a hand in Coulibaly’s supermarket hostage-taking, though she was not identified among the dead or wounded.
Later on Saturday, however, police sources determined that Boumeddiene was probably in Turkey, and had travelled there “some time ago,” well before the killings. Investigators are now trying to determine if she is in Syria.
Coulibaly was a 32-year-old longtime criminal who apparently became a radical Muslim during one of his frequent stints in prison — pushed towards extreme Islam by a prison-mate — Cherif Kouachi, one of the two brothers responsible for the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Coulibaly killed four hostages at a Jewish supermarket and called friends from the scene urging them to stage further attacks. In a brief phone call to French television station BFMTV midway through the supermarket siege, he claimed to belong to Islamic State.
One of seven children to a mother who died when she was six, Boumeddiene was put into foster care with her young siblings because her father, a delivery man, was unable to take care of them.
Le Parisien newspaper said she lost her job as a cashier because she insisted on wearing the top-to-toe Islamic wear known as a niqab.
Hollande held an emergency meeting of key ministers early on Saturday, hours after a dramatic end to twin sieges that also resulted in the death of two brothers who had killed 12 at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine on Wednesday.