Two days before masked jihadists stormed into the newsroom of French magazine Charlie Hebdo, another jihadist took to Twitter in what
the Daily Mail says may have been an ominous warning.
Someone with the Twitter handle @PaladinofJihad, who the Daily Mail said is a known Islamic State (ISIS) fighter and "hardline jihadist" sent a message at 1:14 p.m. Monday. It read: “Snail-eating people.”
Then hours after the attack in which 12 people were killed, @PaladinofJihad tweeted "You heard it here first. #SnailEaters ate lead."
"The ISIS fighter's tweets now raise questions about what role, if any, ISIS may have played in the massacre, with the two suspects previously linked only to al-Qaida," the Daily Mail reports.
The two suspects at the siege on the satirical magazine that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad have been identified as brothers Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34. Both men have reportedly been radicalized by al-Qaida.
The BBC reports that Cherif Kouachi, also known as Abu Issen, was a member of the "Buttes-Chaumont network" that sent jihadists to fight for al-Qaida in Iraq after the United States and Great Britain invaded the country in 2003. In 2008, he was convicted on terrorism charges and imprisoned.
French police disclosed Thursday that Said Kouachi had previously traveled to Yemen, but it was unknown whether he joined a terrorist group there.
The U.S. had flagged both brothers as terrorist threats and placed them on the no-fly list.
The sophisticated weaponry and a well-thought out plan that enabled the shooters to getaway points to the possibility that they may have had ties to a larger organization and were not lone-wolves,
according to The Independent.
"The gunmen sought out by name cartoonists, accused of producing drawings insulting towards Islam, and then executed them, before turning their fire on the others," according to the newspaper. "This was very specific retribution; the masked men were heard shouting 'the prophet has been avenged.'"
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