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Said Kouachi

Said Kouachi (7 September 1980-9 January 2015) was a French member of al-Qaeda's Yemen branch's affiliate of the Buttes-Chaumont Network. He and his brother Cherif Kouachi killed 12 people in the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, motivated by Islamic terrorism.

Biography[]

Said Kouachi was the first son of an Algerian family in Gennevilliers, Paris, France, two years older than Cherif Kouachi. Their parents died when they were young, and the two developed radical Islamist beliefs. However, Cherif was the high-profile one as Said did not carry out any major crimes. In 2011 he decided to travel to Yemen, where he was trained as a terrorist by al-Qaeda, as he and his brother were incensed by the discovery of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Said decided to join his brother on 7 January 2015 for an attack on the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose Jyllands-Posten caricatures of prophet Muhammad led to controvery. The two forced employees to reveal the locations of the cartoonists and they proceeded to kill 12 people, including famous cartoonists Charb (the editor), Tignous, Georges Wolinski, Elsa Cayat, Philippe Honore, and Bernard Maris. They left the office and fought off police, with the police reporting that they fought like trained commandos. They fled to Dammartin-en-Goele, where they seized a hostage at an industrial estate. Said and Cherif communicated with fellow terrorists Amedy Coulibaly and Hayat Boumeddiene, who killed policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe and took hostages in Vincennes. At 10:07 CET, the two were killed while coming out of the building firing.

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