A worldwide investigation is under way aimed at uncovering potential jihadi networks connected to the Paris killers, with an urgent priority on discovering whether any further attacks are planned.  It emerged on Sunday that police surveillance on the Kouachi brothers had been lifted months before the Paris attacks, on the grounds they were not thought to pose a threat despite their jihadi links and travel to the Middle East. European police and intelligence services are combing through their dossiers to see if links to other “sleeper cells” may have been missed.  Meanwhile, the emergence of a video showing the Paris supermarket gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, aligning himself with the Islamic State extremist group demonstrated the complex nature of the threat. It is not yet clear whether Isis had any organisational role in the attack or was simply claimed by Coulibaly as an inspiration. Either way, it showed the Islamic extremist group extending its reach from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq into the west.  In statements, Isis has threatened that the Paris attacks were merely the start of a campaign against the west, and the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag quoted US intelligence sources as warning of a wave of attacks across Europe.  Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, who killed 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices last Wednesday, told witnesses they were acting on behalf of al-Qaida in Yemen, otherwise known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Yemeni, French and US reports say that Saïd, the elder of the two, made several visits to Yemen between 2009 and 2012, when he is thought to have received firearms training. Chérif Kouachi also claimed in a telephone interview with French television channel BFMTV to have trained in Yemen, but that has not been confirmed. Nor have reports that the brothers travelled to Syria.  In recent years, AQAP has emerged as the most potent al-Qaida affiliate in terms of its ability to carry out operations against western targets. That is attributed in part to the enduring popularity of its American-born figurehead, Anwar al-Awlaki, whose videos calling for jihad against the west have remained in circulation years after his death in a US drone strike in September 2011.  According to Yemeni reports, Saïd Kouachi shared a room at some point with Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, a Nigerian AQAP member arrested in Detroit in December 2009 after his abortive attempt to blow up a civilian airliner with explosives hidden in his underwear. AbdulMutallab, aged 23 at the time, had previously studied engineering in London.  Despite such links, phone surveillance by the French domestic security service DGSI was lifted from Chérif Kouachi at the end of 2013, and from Saïd in summer 2014, according to Libération newspaper. “Wiretap warrants were not renewed because there were other priorities and Chérif, at that time, seemed to be moving in the direction of peddling fake goods. He wasn’t really in touch with the most dangerous people in radical Islamic circles,” a French government source told Libération.  It is not clear why surveillance on Saïd was lifted. L’Express reported simply that the police focus shifted to other suspects.  The investigation is also delving into the past connections of Chérif Kouachi, and in particular the Buttes Chaumont jihadi network, named after a Paris park where volunteer Islamist fighters trained prior to going to fight in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion. Chérif was jailed for 18 months in 2008 for his membership of the network, although there is no evidence he travelled to Iraq himself. On Sunday, it was reported that the ideologue of the group, Farid Benyettou, who was sentenced to six years in prison in 2008, has been working since December as a trainee nurse in the emergency services at a Paris hospital. According to Le Parisien, Benyettou had not been at work on Wednesday or Thursday, but was on duty over the weekend.  While in pretrial detention for his part in the Buttes Chaumont network, Chérif Kouachi met Djemal Beghal, a French-Algerian al-Qaida recruiter imprisoned for an attempted attack on the US embassy in Paris in 2001. Coulibaly was also an admirer of Beghal, who had preached in London’s Finsbury Park mosque, and may have first tried to establish contact through Kouachi.  In 2010 both Chérif Kouachi and Coulibaly were arrested on suspicion of plotting to free an Algerian in French jail for a 1995 bomb attack on the Paris metro. Coulibaly was jailed but Kouachi was freed for lack of evidence.  Meanwhile, a solid bond developed between Coulibaly’s partner, Hayat Boumeddiene and Chérif Kouachi’s wife. According to French authorities, the two women spoke more than 500 times by phone over the course of 2014. Boumeddiene is reported to have left France for Turkey on 2 January, before the Paris attacks and crossed into Syria six days later.
Priority is uncovering further planned attacks, as it emerges surveillance on Chérif and Saïd Kouachi was lifted months ago