But Aitboulahcen had grown fascinated by Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of the kosher supermarket shooter Amedy Coulibaly. Boumeddiene was “her role model,” Sonia told me. When the Paris attacks happened, Aitboulahcen didn’t respond with sorrow or outrage. Instead, she asked Sonia to straighten her hair so that she could go out.
“They’re all unbelievers,” she said of the victims, Sonia recalled. “Nothing can happen to me.”
She remained casual and seemingly unaffected until Sunday evening, November 15, when she and members of her surrogate family returned home after a walk through Saint-Denis. Then Aitboulahcen’s cell phone lit up. The number on the screen started with the country code for Belgium.
But Aitboulahcen did not recognize the number, Sonia recalled, and didn’t believe the man on the other end of the line when he said he was calling on behalf of her cousin. She hung up. But the phone rang again.
“I’m not going to explain everything: you saw what happened on TV,” the caller said. She was then instructed to find a hiding place for her cousin, “for no more than a day or two.”
A switch seemed to flip in Aitboulahcen’s mind. She began to believe that this might really be someone calling on behalf of her cousin, and Sonia said she seemed thrilled. “Tell me what I have to do,” Aitboulahcen said eagerly.
Sonia later told police that at the time even Aitboulahcen was unsure which cousin needed her help. Both women wondered if it was actually Abaaoud’s younger brother—the one he’d kidnapped and taken to Syria several years earlier. The boy was thought to be dead, but in the chaos of the caliphate anything was possible.
“She hung up and told me her little cousin from Syria was here, sixteen-year-old Younes,” Sonia said. “I told her we were going to get him but that if he was injured we would take him to the hospital. And that if he’d done something wrong, I’d take him to the cops.… I said to myself, I can’t leave a sixteen-year-old outside in the cold. I have a son the same age.”
That night, they drove to the address Aitboulahcen had been given. Abdelhamid Abaaoud stepped from the shadows into a dim streetlight. “This is when I recognized him,” Sonia told authorities. Earlier, Aitboulahcen had shown Sonia and her family a video of Abaaoud in Syria, dragging corpses tied to the back of a truck.
Abaaoud told Aitboulahcen that he would give her five thousand euros to help him find a hiding place for forty-eight hours and to pay for new suits and shoes for himself and an associate, who stayed out of sight.
Her anger exceeding her apprehension, Sonia asked Abaaoud whether he was involved in the attacks and why he would be willing to kill so many innocent people.
“He said we were lost sheep and that he wanted to blow us all up,” Sonia recalled. He added that many other Islamic State acolytes had come back to Europe with him and that the Paris attacks were “nothing compared to what was going to happen for the holidays.”
As the three walked toward the car, Abaaoud seemed exceedingly nervous. Sonia’s husband—a stranger to Abaaoud—was in the driver’s seat. It looked to them as if Abaaoud was reaching for a weapon. Abaaoud opened the car door and climbed into the back, but the group made it only 150 yards before he suddenly asked them to stop and let him out.
The women and Sonia’s husband drove off, and Aitboulahcen’s phone rang again. “You can tell the little couple that if they talk my brothers will take care of them,” the caller said. When Aitboulahcen laughingly told Sonia and her husband about it, Sonia’s husband slapped her in the face. He later told me he was so upset and angry that she’d put them in danger that he couldn’t control himself.
That night, Sonia said, she kept pouring wine for Aitboulahcen “to get her drunk so that she would call the police.” But the ruse didn’t work, and the others in the house were too paralyzed to make a move themselves.
“I was scared because I thought if the terrorists knew I’d come forward they’d kill me,” Sonia said.
The next day, when Aitboulahcen left the house, Sonia called the French equivalent of 911. Records indicate that it took more than three hours for the critical tip to prompt a return call from France’s elite counterterrorism squad. She spent much of that evening giving the authorities a detailed account of the meeting with Abaaoud. When she got home, a curious Aitboulahcen asked where Sonia had gone. To dinner and a movie, her friend replied.
For the next twenty-four hours, Abaaoud remained at large. Aitboulahcen, meanwhile, bought the shoes and suits her cousin wanted.
As she left home on Tuesday night, “it seemed like she was saying good-bye,” Sonia recalled. “She told me that she loved me, that I’d been a great mother to her, that I would go to heaven.”
Trying to act normally, Sonia asked Aitboulahcen if she could pick her up later that night. Aitboulahcen gave Sonia the address, which she quickly passed on to the authorities.
Until we published our story in the Post in April 2016, the public had no idea that the critical tip in the hunt for Abaaoud came from a Muslim woman who now fears she is a target of the Islamic State.
Video of the Saint-Denis raid includes a female voice pleading to be let out, saying, “I want to leave,” followed by an explosion so powerful it sent debris into the street. At first, French authorities said that Aitboulahcen had detonated a suicide bomb as police closed in, but they later conceded this was not the case. Sonia suspected that she played a role in forcing police to alter that account by calling them and threatening to go public with her role and her interactions with investigators.
“I heard of Hasna’s death on TV,” Sonia said. “I was devastated. I miss her.”
Sonia and her husband felt somehow responsible for Aitboulahcen’s death. “I had told the police not to harm Hasna,” she said. “They should have allowed her to leave, she wanted to leave the apartment. You can hear it in the video.”
“What really gets on my nerves is how people now speak badly about Muslims, though it was me, a Muslim woman, who helped the authorities to find Abaaoud,” Sonia said. “There could have been more attacks otherwise.”
Sonia believes that people like Abdelhamid Abaaoud drift into the arms of ISIS not because of Islam but because of their broken families and the racism they face in Europe. “I told him, ‘You have killed innocent people. Islam does not allow this,’” she said, opening her dark brown eyes wide. “This is also the reason why I decided to call the police and tell them where he was. He had killed innocent people, and he was going to kill more.”
EPILOGUE
The Deepest Cut
Germany and Morocco, 2016