Boumeddiene ‘wife’ of gunman in terror attack

MANILA, Philippines - Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, is the “wife” of Amedy Coulibaly, one of the gunmen in the terror attack.

According to The Daily Mail online, the couple “married’” in a religious ceremony after Boumeddiene, who was never seen without her veil, waited four years for him to come out of jail following his conviction for armed robbery.

The couple were never married in a civil ceremony – the only form of marriage legally accepted in France.

Boumeddiene walked away from a low-paid job as a cashier in 2009 and started wearing a veil. She “devoted herself” to Coulibaly.

Cool and composed, she never wavered under police cross examination in an earlier arrest.

When told they knew she and Coulibaly had visited Beghal at the same time as Cherif Kouachi and two other convicted terrorists, she replied: “We went there for crossbow practice.”

While Coulibaly had a well-documented track record, details of Boumeddiene’s troubled childhood are only now emerging, the Daily Mail said. 

Like her husband she was born into a large family of seven children.

In 1988 when she was just six years old, her mother died.

The eldest children left home, according to reports in Le Parisien, and social workers took over. Reports said  Boumeddiene may have been put into care.

Estranged from her father, she met him briefly once more and introduced him to Coulibaly.

Questioned by police yesterday at his home in Nanterre, a Paris suburb, Boumeddiene’s father appeared to be shocked and unable to believe that his daughter was involved with the terrorist cell.

She is from an Algerian background and altered her surname to “make it sound more French,” according to an investigating source.

Interrogated by police in 2010, Boumeddiene said she was inspired by her husband and the radicals she lived with to “read a lot of books on religion and because of this, I came to ask questions on religion.” – Daily Mail Online