France Charges 2 Suspected of Ties to Gunman in Attacks

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/world/europe/france-charges-2-suspected-of-ties-to-gunman-in-attacks.html

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PARIS — French judges on Friday placed under formal investigation two men believed to have links to Amedy Coulibaly, one of the three gunmen involved in the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January, the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The two men, identified by prosecutors as Amar R., 33, and Said M., 25, are charged with “terrorist conspiracy to commit crimes against people.”

They are part of a group of four people who were detained this week, including a police officer described by news reports as Amar’s girlfriend. Police officers freed the two other detainees, and according to the news reports one of them was the officer.

Mr. Coulibaly, 32, a French citizen with immigrant roots, died in a police assault on a kosher grocery on Jan. 9 after he took several hostages, killing four of them, and a day after he shot a police officer in Montrouge, a Paris suburb. Twelve other people were killed in a terrorist assault by two other gunmen on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Jan. 7.

In a video posted on Twitter, Mr. Coulibaly declared his allegiance to the Islamic State militant group and encouraged young French Muslims to take up the fight.

Four other suspects, aged 22 to 28, have also been charged in the case, accused of assisting Mr. Coulibaly and carrying weapons.

Amar R. was jailed between 2010 and 2013 at a prison near Paris, where he met Mr. Coulibaly, and the two saw each other more than 10 times before the attacks, the prosecutor’s office said. They also exchanged more than 600 text messages, particularly on Jan. 5 and 6. Amar has five convictions for gang assault, theft and abduction.

The other suspect, Said, was also convicted several times for gang assault and theft, the prosecutor’s statement said. The French police found his DNA on the strap of a Taser that was among Mr. Coulibaly’s belongings after the assault on the Jewish grocery.

Said also appeared to have been regularly in contact with Amar before the attacks, the statement said.