It was a decade ago, the war on terror was in full swing, Iraq was on fire, and every day there were images of American combat soldiers on patrols on French TV.
Cherif and Said Kouachi, both in their mid-20s, were trying to find their way in the upper northwest corner of Paris, in the 19th arrondisement, a poor hard-knock area known for its disenfranchised and at-times seething immigrant population.
In their 20s, one of the brothers’ favorite spots was the city’s fifth largest public park, the Buttes-Chaumont, with open meadows, ponds, stunning overlooks onto the city and curiously close to the place where for centuries criminals were hanged.
The brothers went to the park for sports training and exercise, but it is there in the Buttes-Chaumont where they also met with more than a dozen other similar young immigrant men, who would all eventually be known to police for a terrorism plot to fight as jihadis in Iraq. One of the Kouachi brothers would be jailed for his involvement in that plot.
But the brothers’ journey would go far beyond the group of men plotting in the Buttes-Chaumont a decade ago.
Theirs would be a journey from youths training in a park to becoming some of the worst terrorists of the modern world.
They would go from meeting disenfranchised youths to rubbing shoulders with influential, international jihadi leaders.
And eventually the unknown brothers’ actions, along with their compatriots’, would culminate in some of the most bloody and horrific crime scenes ever known in Paris, plunging the City of Light into darkness and despair.
Now, they are dead, killed by police in a gunfight after they attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French magazine with a history of mocking Mohammed. Twelve people were killed, including several top editors. The brothers said they were avenging the prophet.
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Court documents detail how Kouachi and Coulibaly worked with Beghal, hiding their conversations by using code names over disposable cell phones.
In April 2010, both Kouachi and Coulibaly were even staying with Beghal, sometimes for days.
Sometimes Hayat Boumeddiene (called Coulibaly’s female companion in documents) joined the visits.
Coulibaly is described in the documents as the logistics expert who was in charge of gathering the weapons and arms in the plot to spring Belkacem. There were elaborate details — sophisticated computers, encryption, details of one-way tickets and handwritten notes in Arabic that when translated turned out to be recipes for poison.
In May 2010 in the Department of Seine Saint Denis, Coulibaly “was found to have illegally stored a huge cache of high caliber arms,” including some 240 cartridges for high-powered machine guns “with the specific goal of seriously hurting people through intimidation or terror acts, in violation of numerous national security laws.
Kouachi, Coulibaly and Beghal eventually would be arrested for the plot. But while Coulibaly went to jail, Kouachi did not, because there was not enough evidence.
Coulibaly was released early, sometime in 2014. Beghal was sentenced to 12 years in prison and remains behind bars.
CNN’s Drew Griffin, Deborah Feyerick, Tim Lister, Caitlin Stark, Arwa Damon and Antonia Mortensen contributed to this report.
