The wife of the Paris supermarket gunman may be in Syria, police sources have said. Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, is partner of Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a policewoman and then four hostages at a kosher bakery. A police source said she flew to Turkey via Madrid on January 2, despite alleged sightings of her in Paris on Thursday. Authorities in Istanbul then reported seeing a woman matching her description cross the Turkey- Syria border on Thursday, the day her husband killed policewoman Clarissa Jean-Phillipe. Sources say she had a return ticket from Istanbul to Madrid for yesterday but failed to show for the flight. Police were today interrogating the wives of the Kouachi brothers responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre in a bid to track down Boumeddiene. Hundreds of phone calls between Boumeddiene and Izzana Hamyd, wife of Cherif Kouachi, have shown up on mobile records. Five hundred in all were made last year. The wife or girlfriend of the older Kouachi brother, Said, is also being held.
French Algerian Boumeddiene is now not thought to have been with Coulibaly at any time in the Kosher Supermarket and to have fled immediately after the killing. Wearing a skimpy bikini with her arms wrapped around her lover's waist, this is Boumeddiene before she turned into a jihadi killer's accomplice and became France's most wanted woman. Photographs of the 'wife' of the Kosher supermarket hostage killer reveal how she was radicalised by the man she would go on to marry. Her husband Amedy Coulibaly is dead, one of the three terrorists who brought France to a halt in 48 hours of bloodshed. Now, 26-year-old Boumeddiene is on the run and is believed to be 'armed and dangerous'. Coulibaly died in a hail of bullets along with four hostages in the storming of the Jewish supermarket. The couple 'married' in a religious ceremony after Boumedienne, who was never seen without her veil, waited four years for him to come out of jail following his conviction for armed robbery.

                         Hayat Boumeddiene is on the run. Photo / AP 



The couple were never married in a civil ceremony - the only form of marriage legally accepted in France. While Coulibaly had a well documented track record, details of Boumeddiene's troubled childhood are only now emerging. Like her husband she was born into a large family, seven children, in 1988 but 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. It is suggested that Boumeddiene may have been put into care. Estranged from her father, she met him briefly once more and introduced him to Coulibaly. But all may not have been as settled as the young woman, radicalised by her husband, thought. It is understood he had made it clear he wanted to take a second wife, according to other reports. Today, questioned by police at his home in Nanterre, a Paris suburb, Boumeddiene's father is said to be shocked and unable to believe that his daughter was involved with the terrorist cell. But it is becoming clear that the one-time cashier was radicalised after meeting the man she would marry. She is from an Algerian background and altered her surname to 'make it sound more French', according to an investigating source. She told police who interviewed her as part of their inquiries into Coulibaly's murky dealings with Islamic extremists that she had walked away from a low-paid job as a cashier in the Juvisy suburb of Paris in 2009 and taken the veil. She 'devoted herself' to Coulibaly. 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'. 'When I saw the massacre of the innocents in Palestine, in Iraq, in Chetchna, in Afghanistan or anywhere the Americans sent their bombers, all that... well, who are the terrorists?' She added that when Americans killed innocents, it was the right of men to defend their women and children. Always cool and composed, Boumeddiene never wavered under police cross examination. When told that they knew she and Coulibaly had visited Beghal at the same time as Cherif Kouachi and two other convicted terrorists, jihadi recruiter Ahmed Laidouni, and Farid Melouk of GIA, she replied: 'We went there for crossbow practice.' The couple lived in nearby Bagneux, where they were known as a devoutly religious couple, despite Coulibaly's regular run-ins with the law. To neighbours the pair were quiet, respectful and normal and had even gone on a holiday to Malaysia together. But a month ago they simply disappeared from their suburban house until flashed across the world's screens today. Coulibaly murdered at least four hostages at the Kosher supermarket in Paris, according to Reuters news agency. He is believed to be part of an Al Qaeda terror cell linked to a British-based jihadi extremist, Djamel Beghal. The 50-year-old preacher, who recruited terrorists while worshipping at London's Finsbury Park mosque, met Cherif Kouachi while in prison in Paris. Coulibaly has a long history of both petty and serious crimes. The only boy born in a family of ten in Juvisy, Essonne, he first came to police attention as a 17-year-old delinquent. Convictions for theft and drug offences followed. In September 2002 in Orleans, Loiret, he was arrested for the armed robbery of a bank. It's believed he became involved with the younger of the Kouachi brothers, Cherif, when he was part of a jihadist recruitment ring in Paris that sent fighters to join the conflict in Iraq. Kouachi was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison. The two sieges by suspected Islamic terrorists played out at the same time, as fears grew that they would be looking to cause another bloodbath. Coulibaly is believed to be the one responsible for shooting a policewoman dead in south Paris on Thursday. The revelation led police to link it to the murder of 12 people around the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine on Wednesday. 'He was in the same Buttes Chaumount cell as the Kouachi brothers,' said a source close to the investigation. 'He was friends of both of them.' Both Said Kouachi, 34, and his brother, Cherif Kouachi, 32 - who have been killed in a building north of Paris - were first arrested in 2005 They were suspected members of the Buttes Chaumont - a group operating out of the 19th arrondissement of Paris and sending terrorist fighters to Iraq. Cherif was convicted in 2008 to three years in prison, with 18 months suspended, for his association with the underground organisation. He had wanted to fly to Iraq via Syria, and was found with a manual for a Kalashnikov - the automatic weapon used in Wednesday's attack. Said was freed after questioning by police, but - like his brother - was known to have been radicalised after the Iraq War of 2003, when Anglo-American forces deposed Saddam Hussein. Both brothers were said to be infuriated by the killing of Muslims by western soldiers and war planes. Vincent Olliviers, Cherif's lawyer at the time, described him as initially being an 'apprentice loser - a delivery boy in a cap who smoked hashish and delivered pizzas to buy his drugs. But Mr Ollivier said the 'clueless kid who did not know what to do with his life met people who gave him the feeling of being important'. Belkacem was a leading members of the GIA, or Armed Islamic Army - an Algerian terror outfit responsible for numerous atrocities. The Kouachi brothers, who are orphans, were radicalised by an Iman operating in northern Paris. They were raised in foster care in Rennes, in western France, with Cherif training as a fitness instructor before moving to Paris. They lived in the 19th arrondissement and were radicalised by Farid Benyettou, a janitor-turned-preacher who gave sermons calling for jihad in Iraq and suicide bombings. The Kouachis share similar backgrounds to Mohammed Merah, the 23-year-old French Algerian responsible for murdering seven people, including four Jews and three Muslim soldiers, in the Toulouse area in 2012. Merah, who was himself shot dead by police, had also been left to operate as a terrorist in France, despite the authorities knowing he had trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Hayat Boumeddiene is hunted by French police as a suspect in the attacks on a satirical paper and Jewish supermarket in Paris left France several day before the killings and is believed to be in Syria, Turkish and French sources said on Saturday.

After killing the gunmen behind the worst assault in France for decades, French police launched in an intensive search for Hayat Boumeddiene, the 26-year-old partner of one of the attackers, describing her as "armed and dangerous".
But a source familiar with the situation said that Boumeddiene left France last week and traveled to Syria via Turkey. A senior Turkish official corroborated that account, saying she passed through Istanbul on January 2.
Security forces remained on high alert before a march on Sunday which will bring together European leaders in a show of solidarity for the 17 victims killed in three days of violence that began with an attack on the Charlie Hebdo weekly on Wednesday and ended with Friday's dual sieges at a print works outside Paris and a kosher supermarket in the city.
French security forces shot dead the two brothers behind the Hebdo killings after they took refuge in the print works. They also killed an associate - Boumeddiene's partner - who planted explosives at the Paris deli in a siege that claimed the lives of four hostages.
On Saturday, police maintained a heavy presence around the French capital, with patrols at sensitive sites including media offices, and local vigils were held across France. The Interior Ministry said about 700,000 people attended including 120,000 in Toulouse, 75,000 in Nantes, and 50,000 in Marseille.
"It's no longer like before," said Maria Pinto, on a street in central Paris. "You work a whole life through and because of these madmen, you leave your house to go shopping, go to work, and you don't know if you'll come home."
The attack on Charlie Hebdo, a journal that satirized Islam as well as other religions and politicians, raised sensitive questions about freedom of speech, religion and security in a country struggling to integrate five million Muslims.
NO WARNING
A source familiar with the situation said that Boumeddiene left France last week and traveled to Syria via Turkey.
"On January 2, a woman corresponding to her profile and presenting a piece of identity took a flight from Madrid to Istanbul," a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.
The source said she was accompanied by a man and had a return ticket for January 9, but never took the flight.
A senior Turkish security official said Paris and Ankara were now cooperating in trying to trace her, but said she arrived in Istanbul without any warning from France.
"After they informed us about her ... we identified her mobile phone signal on Jan 8,” the source said. "We think she is in Syria at the moment but we do not have any evidence about that ... She is most probably not in Turkey," the source said, adding the last signal from her phone was detected on Thursday.
An official police photograph of Boumeddiene shows a young woman with long dark hair hitched back over her ears. French media, however, released photos purporting to be of a fully-veiled Boumeddiene, posing with a cross-bow, in what they said was a 2010 training session in the mountainous Cantal region.
French media described her as one of seven children whose mother died when she was young and whose delivery-man father struggled to keep working while looking after the family. As an adult, she lost her job as a cashier when she converted to Islam and started wearing the niqab.
Le Monde said Boumeddiene wed Amedy Coulibaly in a religious ceremony not recognized by French civil authorities in 2009. The two were questioned by police in 2010 and Coulibaly jailed for his involvement in a botched plot to spring from jail the author of a deadly 1995 attack on the Paris transport system.
BOOBY TRAPS
Participation of European leaders including Germany's Angela Merkel, Britain's David Cameron and Italy's Matteo Renzi in a silent march through Paris with President Francois Hollande will pose further demands for security forces on Sunday.
Arab League representatives and some Muslim African leaders as well as Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will attend.
Political and security chiefs were reviewing how two French-born brothers of Algerian extraction, Cherif and Said Kouachi, could have carried out the Charlie Hebdo attacks despite having been on surveillance and "no-fly" lists for many years.
Paris chief prosecutor Francois Molins said late Friday the three men killed on Friday in the two security operations had had a large arsenal of weapons and had set up booby traps. They had a loaded M82 rocket launcher, two Kalashnikov machine guns and two automatic pistols on them.
With one of the gunmen saying shortly before his death that he was funded by al Qaeda, Hollande warned that the danger to France - home to the European Union's biggest populations of both Muslims and Jews - was not over yet.
"These madmen, fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion," Hollande said in a televised address.
"France has not seen the end of the threats it faces," said Hollande, facing record unpopularity over his handling of the economy but whose government has received praise from at least one senior opposition leader for its handling of the crisis.
An audio recording posted on YouTube attributed to a leader of the Yemeni branch of al Qaeda (AQAP) said the attack was prompted by insults to prophets but stopped short of claiming responsibility for the assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas condemned the strike as an unjustifiable terrorist attack.
Before his death at the printing works, Cherif Kouachi told a television station he had received financing from an al Qaeda preacher, Anwar al Awlaki, in Yemen.
Al Awlaki, an influential international recruiter for al Qaeda, was killed in September 2011 in a drone strike. A senior Yemeni intelligence source told Reuters that Kouachi's brother Said had also met al Awlaki during a stay in Yemen in 2011.
Paris prosecutor Molins said there had been sustained contact between Boumeddiene and the wife of Cherif Kouachi, with records of no fewer than 500 phone calls between the two last year. The wife of Kouachi is being questioned by French police.
Coulibaly had also called BFM-TV, to claim allegiance to Islamic State, saying he wanted to defend Palestinians and target Jews. He said he had jointly planned the attacks with the Kouachi brothers, and police confirmed they were all members of the same Islamist cell in northern Paris.