Amedy Coulibaly, Paris terrorist suspect pledges allegiance to Islamic State in a video

 

Amedy Coulibaly, one of the three gunman responsible for the terrorist attacks in France last week, produced a video that appeared online today, two days after his death, showing him sitting below the flag of the Islamic State militant group and pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the organization’s leader.

The video — which was posted on Twitter and was authenticated by a former lawyer of Mr. Coulibaly’s and a research group that tracks propaganda by militants — provides further evidence that the coordinated attacks last week were at a minimum inspired by organized terrorist groups.

The video, which is seven minutes and 16 seconds long, opens with scenes of the 32-year-old Mr. Coulibaly doing pull-ups and push-ups at a training ground, as well as shots of his assembled arsenal of automatic weapons. The screen goes black, and the title appears: “A Soldier of the Caliphate.”

The extent of Mr. Coulibaly’s ties to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, remains unclear, as does the question of whether he received any training or support from the group as he was said to have plotted the assaults in and around Paris with Saïd and Chérif Kouachi,

In a reference to the Islamic State leader, Mr. Baghdadi, Mr. Coulibaly adds, “I pledge allegiance to the caliph.”

The authorities say that Mr. Coulibaly was responsible for the killing of a police officer in Montrouge, a Paris suburb, on Thursday and a siege of a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday, where four hostages died. On Sunday, a prosecutor in France said that shell casings used in the shooting of a jogger in a Paris suburb on Wednesday had been linked to the weapon that was said to have been used by Mr. Coulibaly at the supermarket, The Associated Press reported. The jogger survived.

Regarding his relationship to the Kouachi brothers, who are suspected of leading the attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo where 12 people were massacred, he states that they acted separately but with some coordination. His choice of words suggests that the assault on the publication, which had published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, was conceived separately by the Kouachis and that he piggybacked onto their attack.

“The brothers in our team divided themselves into two,” he said.

“We partly worked together, but we also worked separately,” he said, adding that he had helped one of the Kouachi brothers by providing several thousand euros “so that he could finish what he started and by the grace of God, we were able to synchronize ourselves.”