Authorities hunt most wanted woman in France; fears of new terror attack
France, Jan. 11 (NsNewsWire) –French police forces continued Saturday the intense manhunt for the wife of one of the terrorists who was killed after taking hostages the day before at a kosher grocery store in Paris.
Hayat Boumeddiene, who is suspected of being involved in the killing of a policewoman in a Paris suburb on Thursday is also believed to have been an accomplice for her boyfriend, Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed in the police raid at the store Hyper Cacher. Four hostages were killed before authorities gained entry, reports foxnews.
Early reports indicated that Boumeddiene was inside the store at the time of the hostage taking, but there is no evidence to support that information.
Boumeddiene married Coulibaly in an Islamic religious ceremony in July 2009 — a union not recognized by French law. A circular distributed Friday by French police said Boumeddiene should be considered dangerous and potentially armed. The couple reportedly travelled several times to the French countryside to fire crossbows.
It is unclear what, if any, links Boumeddiene has to the store attack, but prosecutors said she has ties to Cherif Kouachi, one of the brothers whose attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine Wednesday left a dozen dead. Cherif and his brother Said, who both died Friday in a separate raid at a printing facility about 25 miles outside Paris, were radicalized and are believed to have ties to Al Qaeda in Yemen.
The Paris prosecutor’s office told The New York Times that Boumeddiene had been in “constant and sustained” contact with Cherif’s girlfriend. The report said Cherif and Couibaly were followers of a French-Algerian jihad supporter named Djamel Beghal. He served time in prison for involvement in a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris and was released.