French Terrorist Declares Loyalty to ISIS in Posthumous Video
Amedy Coulibaly, who took fourteen hostages and killed four in a kosher supermarket before he was shot and killed by French special forces on Friday, pledges allegiance to the Islamic State in a video released today on what is reportedly an official ISIS forum.
The SITE Intelligence Group confirmed the authenticity of the video to the Associated Press. In it, the 32-year-old Coulibaly declares himself to be a "soldier of the Caliphate" and addresses other French Muslims.
"What do you do, my brothers, when the prophet keeps being insulted?" he asks, according to Vocativ's translation. "I have been to a lot of mosques in France, particularly around Paris. They are full of young, fit men. How come so few stand up to defend our people?" Jihadi recruiters work extensively in France's prison system, Reuters reported in 2013, radicalizing young Muslim men jailed for minor offenses.
Coulibaly also explains his relationship with Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. "We did a few things together and a few things separately to maximize the impact," Coulibaly said. "I helped them by giving them a few thousand euros to buy what they needed." A source within Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula yesterday provided The Intercept with a statement taking responsibility for the Kouachi brother's attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
The Associated Press reported today that a French prosecutor issued a brief statement announcing that ballistics tests had connected Coulibaly to the shooting of a jogger in a Paris suburb on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack. The jogger was badly injured.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement declaring that all of the Jewish hostages who were killed in the kosher supermarket on Friday would be buried in Israel.