The last time Peter Cherif spoke before a criminal court was on October 23, 2020, at the trial for the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher. The Parisian jihadist was then heard as a simple witness by videoconference from the Bois-d’Arcy prison (Yvelines). After reciting the opening sura of the Koran in Arabic, he declared: “I was forced to come here to testify on a matter that I have nothing to do with, I will not answer any questions.” He then fell into a long, icy silence, refusing to answer questions for twenty minutes.
His silence caused deep concern in the room, such are the suspicions that weigh on this veteran of jihad, suspected of being one of the missing pieces of the terrorist project of the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who murdered twelve people on January 7, 2015, including eight members of the editorial team of Charlie HebdoHowever, the timing of the investigations did not allow him to return to the dock: when Peter Cherif was arrested in Djibouti in December 2018, after having spent seven years in Yemen in the ranks of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the investigating judges had just concluded their investigation.
More than five years after his surprise arrest on the shores of the Gulf of Aden, the 42-year-old Parisian jihadist will appear alone, starting Monday, September 16, before the special court in Paris for “associating terrorist criminals.” He will have to answer for his time in the ranks of AQAP, his involvement in the management of three French hostages kidnapped in 2011 by the terrorist group, but also for the role he may have played during the stay in Yemen of his childhood friend, Chérif Kouachi, on the occasion of which AQAP commissioned the latter to carry out the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Friends of the neighborhood
Peter Cherif and Chérif Kouachi have known each other since their teenage years in a working-class 19th-century town.my district of Paris. Together with other young people from the neighbourhood, including Saïd Kouachi and Boubaker El-Hakim, a future senior executive of the Islamic State organisation, they were radicalised through contact with a charismatic religious figure within this small circle, Farid Benyettou. The two friends from the neighbourhood were later convicted for their participation in a network that sent jihadists to Iraq in the mid-2000s, the so-called “Buttes-Chaumont” network.
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