No other details were immediately available, but one of the brothers, Cherif Kouachi, 32, was sentenced to a year and a half in prison in 2008 after a Paris court found him and six other men guilty of helping funnel fighters to Iraq.
The information raises the question of why Kouachi and his brother, Said, 34, the other suspect at large, escaped the attention of authorities before the attack on the satirical magazine Wednesday, which killed 12 people. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters that both were “being watched over, but there were no elements at the time to warrant starting an inquiry.”
The trial in 2008 began after years of investigation. Authorities said at the time that a militant network had funneled about a dozen French fighters to camps linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, and sought to send more before Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006.
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