Female Gendarme Arrested Over Suspected Links With Coulibaly Murders

French police are questioning a female gendarmerie officer and her boyfriend over possible links to the Islamic fundamentalist Amedy Coulibaly who held up a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

Four people were arrested in the swoop including a woman only known so far as ‘Emmanuelle’ and her boyfriend Amar who Police believe was with Amedy Coulibaly shortly before he attacked the Hypercache kosher supermarket on January 9th, murdering four people, the Independent reports.

Coulibaly, who was killed during a police assault on the building after hostages were taken, was operating in coordination with the jihadist Kouachi brothers who had killed 12 people in an attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine two days earlier.

The man is already in custody on drugs charges and currently investigators are unsure whether he himself was part of the radical group comprising the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly, which had links to Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, or just a criminal used by them to supply weapons.

But it is the gendarmerie officer Emmanuelle who will cause the French authorities great embarrassment and who has been accused of entering gendarmerie intelligence files in Rosny-sous-Bois in the days after the attacks to try to find out how much her colleagues knew about her boyfriend Amar.

While there is no evidence to suggest she was an Islamic extremist or involved in the jihadi attacks in January which left seventeen people dead, she had converted to Islam two years ago and hidden the fact from her superiors. While working at the high security intelligence headquarters at Rosny, south of Paris, she wore her uniform including her gendamerie cap but would swap it for an Islamic headscarf when she left the building.

And it has been reported that on several occasions, she allowed her boyfriend into the restricted building without permission. According to Le Figaro, she was suspended from her duties in February.

She is not the only woman to have been caught up with the extremists: Last month Islamic State published what it described as an interview with Coulibaly’s widow, Hayat Boumeddiene, who became one of the world’s most wanted women after the murders in January. The extremists claim she is amongst their fighters, with authorities believing she fled to Syria not long before her husband carried out the attacks.