PARIS (AP) – Blood-curdling, al-Qaida-inspired murder that tore at the heart of the nation which raised him wasn’t ghoulish enough for Cherif Kouachi. His body, felled by elite soldiers’ bullets and stun grenades, wasn’t yet cold when he also came back from the dead.
Kouachi had picked up the phone when a reporter for news channel BFM rang the printing plant, their final redoubt, where an army of soldiers, police officers, and helicopters cornered them after a 40-plus-hour manhunt through villages and woodlands of northern France.
BFM waited until after the brothers and another member of their terror cell, who killed four hostages in a kosher grocery in Paris, were dead before broadcasting its haunting audio. Sounding determined and so chillingly sure of himself and his extremist Islamic rhetoric, Kouachi’s fluent French put words to France’s worst nightmare: its own sons, heads filled with jihadi dreams of murder and martyrdom, coming home from foreign battlefields to wage war.
“We are the defenders of the Prophet,” he said. “I, Cherif Kouachi, was sent by al-Qaida from Yemen.”
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