One of the terror jihadist brothers involved in the Charlie Hebdo magazine slaughter Wednesday told a French journalist hours before his death that he'd been sent by al-Qaida's Yemen-based branch.
Cherif Kouachi, 32, spoke by phone Friday morning to Igor Sahiri of BFM-TV, who recorded the conversation,
Vox reports.
"I was sent, me, Chérif Kouachi, by al-Qaida of Yemen," he says in the call, mentioning U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki. BFM-TV did not broadcast the call because at the time the standoff with Kouachi and older brother Said Kouachi, 34, was still under way.
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Awlaki was seen as an influential international recruiter for the alQaida movement and a prominent figure in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the group's most active affiliate. He was killed in September 2011 in a drone strike widely attributed to the CIA.
The New York Times reports that Said Kouachi was in Yemen training with AQAP in 2011.
According to BFM journalist Sarah-Lou Cohen, Cherif Koauchi declared he was seeking revenge for the Prophet Muhammad.
"They explained as well that they deny having killed civilians," Cohen told Vox, paraphrasing from parts of the call not played on air. "That's important, because for them, the journalists at Charlie Hebdo were not civilians, they were targets."
"Then he continued, very calmly, explaining that they did not come to kill women and children but it's us, the Westerners, he said, who are killing children in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Syria."
"He spoke in a manner … that was very calm and very determined," Cohen told Vox, "as if he had also prepared answers."
It was "extremely troubling," she told the website. "The message was to pass along his claim of responsibility. He intended that his claims be publicly known."
In a separate interview about five hours later, the channel also spoke with Amedy Coulibaly, who had separately invaded a Jewish grocery in Paris on Friday and was holding hostages until he too
was shot and killed by authorities storming the facility.
"That was a different situation, because we got a phone call," Cohen told Vox. "He called us because in fact he was looking to contact the police."
"He claimed to be part of the Islamic State [ISIS] very clearly," Cohen told Vox. "He said he had instructions from the caliphate. And then another very important element, evidently, as we were saying in the afternoon, he established a link with the Kouachi brothers."
Coulibaly told Alexis Delahousse, another BFM journalist, that he and the Kouachi brothers had planned their attacks together but had not been in touch since they began the the operations, Vox reports.
"Finally, he explained also why he did this: to defend oppressed Muslims, he said, notably in Palestine," Cohen told Vox. "And finally he explained his target, why this kosher store: because he was targeting Jews."
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