As my colleagues and I walked around the area where Boumeddiene had grown up, I couldn’t help but wonder what would have become of me if I had come of age in a place like that. What would have become of anyone?
It wasn’t an excuse for turning into a terrorist or a criminal. But growing up in a place like Villiers-sur-Marne can make it easy for youngsters to feel alienated. I remembered the mixture of anger and fear I felt as a teenager when I learned that the houses of Turkish migrants had been burned in Solingen and M?lln. Living in an affluent neighborhood such as Holzhausen had meant we weren’t surrounded by other migrants who felt frustrated by persistent discrimination. I’d been inspired by the words my grandparents spoke to me as a child and the presence of my parents and my godparents, who constantly told me that if I worked hard I’d have a chance in life.
What encouragement did Hayat Boumeddiene have? And what about some of the teenagers and young men we saw now, standing around these public housing complexes? The place was not inviting. Many of the kitchens looked identical, with packages of vegetables or shelf-safe milk in the windows. African and Arabic music played through open windows, and people talked loudly inside the apartments. There was concrete everywhere, and no greenery or playgrounds. Small children didn’t play here, it seemed, though we did see four guys standing in a circle in a shadowy corner, handling something we thought might be drugs. As we watched, an old man in a prayer cap passed, leaning on a stick.
Boumeddiene had grown up in one of these buildings. Her mother had died from a heart ailment when she was eight years old, family friends told us. “Her father had six children. He had to work and thought he had no other choice but to marry another woman,” one of his friends said. It sounded like a convenient explanation for questionable behavior.
He remarried within a month of his first wife’s death. But his new bride clashed with her stepchildren. “There was constant fighting at home,” one of the family friends told us. “The father eventually took the side of his new wife.”
For Boumeddiene and her siblings, that meant being thrown out of the house or given away. She was sent to a group home when she was thirteen. The family she stayed with came from the same Algerian city as her father.
Boumeddiene favored makeup and rambling phone calls with friends, said Omar, her foster brother, who spoke on the condition that his family’s last name not be published. We met him in front of his parents’ modest house. It was only a short distance from the tall gray towers of the banlieues, but in a much nicer neighborhood.
He said that his family was shocked when they learned that she might have been involved in her husband’s plan. To Omar, it was as if they were speaking about a different person. “She was fragile and clearly shaken by her mother’s death,” he said. She wasn’t often in touch with her father, who didn’t seem very interested in her well-being.
“We introduced her to a very nice man in Algeria, but she didn’t like him,” Omar told us. When she turned eighteen, she moved to Paris, a long-cherished dream. Hungry for freedom and captivated by the idea of travel, she got a job selling sandwiches and coffee on a high-speed train. She loved to go out with friends and window shop. In 2007, a high school friend introduced Boumeddiene to one of her boyfriend’s prison buddies, Amedy Coulibaly, who had just been released after serving time for armed robbery. Like her, he came from a migrant family and had been born in France.
Back at our hotel in Paris, we examined court documents we’d gathered from various sources, including a police interrogation of Boumeddiene in 2010, after Coulibaly was charged with trying to break a top militant out of a French jail. She said that neither she nor her husband had been very religious when they met, but they’d changed together.
She told the police about her difficult past and how Islam had answered all her questions and brought her peace. She had grown interested in the faith after she met Coulibaly, when she befriended the wives of some of his prison acquaintances, including the wife of one of the Kouachi brothers. Two years after they met, she and Coulibaly were married in a religious ceremony. (Such marriages are not recognized by French law.) Boumeddiene didn’t attend, explaining that Islam doesn’t require a woman to be present at her wedding. “My father stood in for me,” she told police.
Boumeddiene quickly became more observant than her husband. He prayed at the mosque “on his own timetable,” every three weeks or so. She, meanwhile, started wearing a full-face veil and quit her job as a cashier at a bakery. She also told police about the circles she and Coulibaly moved through, and how they grew close to Chérif Kouachi, the younger of the future Charlie Hebdo attackers.
Boumeddiene spoke of “innocent people massacred in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, where Americans send bombs and all that—and they’re not terrorists?” She continued: “When Americans kill innocent people, it’s of course justifiable that men should take up arms to defend their wives and children.”
At some point during this period, she reconnected with her father. But when I reached him in Algeria after the attacks, all I heard were accusations and excuses. “This girl didn’t grow up in my house. She grew up in the house of nonbelievers. She made all these decisions on her own,” he told me.
I was taken aback by his coarseness. “That’s all you have to say?” I asked. It was.
I knew from my own experience how important it was to have a circle of family and friends who were there in moments of adolescent anger, when it was easy to listen to people who told us what we wanted to hear, namely that we were victims—and that all the millions of Muslims in the world were victims.
In October 2014, Boumeddiene and Coulibaly went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. I asked a Saudi intelligence official if he’d received any information or warnings from his French counterparts about Coulibaly’s terrorism ties when he visited.
“No, we did not,” he said, “and it’s especially upsetting, because we had no options to decide if we wanted such a person in our country or to react accordingly and follow him so we could see if he was in touch with other people.”