PARIS — The two French brothers wanted in the newspaper attack in Paris were known to U.S. counterterrorism authorities and had been put on the American no-fly list, a senior U.S. official said Thursday.
Another U.S. official said the older brother, Said Kouachi, had traveled to Yemen. It was unclear whether he was there to join up with extremist groups like al-Qaeda.
Witnesses said the gunmen who carried out the shooting rampage Wednesday claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen.
The details emerged as French authorities conducted an all-out manhunt for the Kouachi brothers — Cherif, 32, and Said, 34 — in the attack that killed 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly that had lampooned radical Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
They were identified as suspects after the older brother’s ID card was found in the getaway car, authorities said.
Both men — the Paris-born offspring of Algerian parents — were known to French counterterrorism authorities.
Cherif, a former pizza deliveryman, had appeared in a 2005 French TV documentary on Islamic extremism and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 for trying to join up with fighters battling in Iraq.
U.S. officials would not say whether the Kouachis were thought to have fought in the Middle East with extremist groups.
A French security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that American authorities had shared intelligence with France indicating that Said had traveled to Yemen several years ago for training, and were seeking to verify its accuracy.
Before the words of a radical preacher persuaded him to book a flight to Syria to wage holy war, Cherif Kouachi was a ladies’ man who belted out rap lyrics.
It was the teachings of a firebrand Muslim preacher that put him on the path to jihad in his rough-and-tumble neighborhood of northeastern Paris, Kouachi was quoted as saying in the documentary.
The cleric “told me that (holy) texts prove the benefits of suicide attacks,” Kouachi was quoted as saying. “It’s written in the texts that it’s good to die as a martyr.”
Cherif Kouachi’s attorney in his 2008 trial said at the time that his client had fallen in 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 to the battlefields of Iraq.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, however, said Thursday that Kouachi had been described by fellow would-be jihadis at the time as “violently anti-Semitic.”
In prison, Kouachi became closed off and unresponsive and started growing a beard, the lawyer said, adding that he wondered whether the stint behind bars transformed his client into a ticking time bomb.
Much less has become public about Said, but Cazeneuve said the jobless resident of the city of Reims was also known to authorities, despite having never been prosecuted, because he was “on the periphery” of the illegal activities his younger sibling was involved in.
In Reims, about 90 miles northeast of Paris, Said frequented a prayer room on the ground floor of an apartment building, according to the local imam, Abdul-Hamid al-Khalifa.
“Typically, he’d come late to prayers and leave right when they were done,” Al-Khalifa said in a telephone interview.
