(Adds quotes from Cavusoglu and interior minister)
By Humeyra Pamuk
ISTANBUL, Jan 12 (Reuters) - The suspected female accomplice
of Islamist militants behind attacks in Paris was in Turkey
five days before the killings and crossed into Syria on Jan. 8,
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was cited on Monday by the
state-run Anatolian News Agency as saying.
French authorities launched a search for 26-year-old Hayat
Boumeddiene after French anti-terrorist police killed her
partner Amedy Coulibaly in storming a Jewish supermarket where
he had taken hostages, describing her as armed and dangerous.
Anatolian, on its website, cited Cavusoglu as saying in an
interview she arrived in Istanbul from Madrid on Jan. 2.
"There is footage (of her) at the airport. Later on, she
stayed at a hotel with another person and crossed into Syria on
January 8. We can tell that based on telephone records," he
said.
Those dates would put Boumeddiene in Turkey before the
violence in Paris began, and leaving for Syria while the
attackers were still on the loose.
Coulibaly said he was carrying out the attack in the name of
Islamic State, a militant Islamist group that has seized swathes
of territory in Iraq and Syria.
Seventeen people, including journalists and policemen, were
killed in three days of violence that began with a shooting
attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday,
Jan. 7, and ended with a hostage-taking at a kosher supermarket
on Friday. The three gunmen were also killed.
Cavusoglu said as soon as Turkey determined the whereabouts
of Boumeddiene, it passed the information to French authorities.
An official French police photograph 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 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 coverted to Islam
and started wearing the niqab.
World leaders including Muslim and Jewish statesmen linked
arms on Sunday to lead more than a million French citizens
through Paris to pay tribute to victims of the attacks.
Turkey received no request to deny access to Boumeddiene,
Interior Minister Efkan Ala told reporters. "The entry of
individuals to Turkey could be blocked based on information from
the originating countries saying this person's entry could be
problematic," Ala said.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Daren Butler and Ralph
Boulton)
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