Spain detains man who sold arms to Hyper Cacher terrorist

Antoine Denevi, a 27-year-old from northern France, suspected of heading a weapons trafficking ring

By AFP and ToI Staff 13 April 2016, 6:55 pm
A policeman stands guard on January 21, 2015, in front the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket where jihadist gunman Amedy Coulibaly killed four Jewish men on January 9, 2015 in Paris. (AFP/Eric Feferberg)

Spanish police said Wednesday they had detained a French national suspected of heading a weapons trafficking ring that provided arms to Amedy Coulibaly, who staged a deadly attack on a Jewish supermarket in Paris last year.

In a statement, police say Antoine Denevi, a 27-year-old originally from the northern French region of Pas-de-Calais, was detained on Tuesday in the southern Spanish area of Malaga at the request of French authorities.

French-born Muslim terrorist Coulibaly walked into the Porte de Vincennes branch of the Hyper Cacher chain in Paris’s eastern suburbs two days after fellow Islamist terrorists shot dead 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a day after he himself shot dead a policewoman.

Coulibaly killed four people and took several hostages at gunpoint, before he was killed when police stormed the building.

A still from CCTV footage from inside Hyper Cacher store shows terrorist Amedy Coulibaly during the siege on January 9, 2015. The image was shown during a BBC documentary called Three Days of Terror: The Charlie Hebdo Attacks that aired January 6, 2016. (screen capture: YouTube)

His four Jewish victims — Yoav Hattab, Phillipe Barham, Yohan Cohen and François-Michel Saada — were buried in Jerusalem.

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