A lover of rap music turned aspiring Muslim holy warrior and his older brother are suddenly the most wanted men in France, suspected of the armed onslaught on a newspaper office that claimed a dozen lives and horrified most of the world.
Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34, were the targets of a mammoth manhunt following yesterday's slayings at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The younger Kouachi, a former pizza deliveryman, had been sentenced to 18 months of prison in 2008 after trying to leave France to join Islamist fighters battling in Iraq.
After he was released he worked in the fish market of a supermarket in the Paris suburbs for six months beginning in October 2009, but supervisors said he gave no cause for concern.
Two years after the conviction, police again detained him, but later released him without charge, in a probe of an alleged plot to free from prison a man who was convicted of bombing a Paris train line in 1995, a French judicial official said.
Associated Press reporters who covered the 2008 trial, which exposed a recruiting pipeline for holy war in a rough multi-ethnic and working-class neighbourhood of northeastern Paris, recalled a skinny young defendant who appeared very nervous in court.
Cherif Kouachi's lawyer said at the time his client had gotten in over his head with the wrong crowd.
During the trial, Kouachi was said to have undergone only minimal training for combat, going jogging in a Paris park to shape up and learning how a Kalashnikov automatic rifle works by studying a sketch.
He was described at the time as a reluctant holy warrior, relieved to have been stopped by French counterespionage officials from taking a Syria-bound flight that was ultimately supposed to lead him into the battlefields of Iraq.
But imprisonment changed his former client, attorney Vincent Ollivier told Le Parisien newspaper in a story published today.
Less is known publicly about Said Kouachi, the older brother, but Prime Minister Manuel Valls told French radio today that both were known to intelligence services and were likely being followed before the Charlie Hebdo attack.
A third suspect identified by French authorities in the Paris newspaper attack that killed 12 people and wounded 11 others has turned himself in.
Mourad Hamyd, 18, surrendered at a police station after learning his name was linked to the attacks in the news, Paris prosecutor spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre said, but she did not specify his relationship to the Kouachi brothers.
