French authorities have told their U.S. counterparts that Said Kouachi, 34, made the trek to the terror hotbed in 2011, said the U.S. official, who is not authorized to comment on the case publicly. He said the French authorities believed he traveled there before Sept. 30, 2011, when the senior al-Qaeda operative in Yemen, U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed by a U.S. drone strike.
Whether Kouachi had any direct contact with al-Awlaki was not known, the official said.
The disclosure comes as authorities continued to amass more detailed dossiers on Kouachi and younger brother Cherif, 32, who remained the subjects of a massive manhunt Thursday following the massacre at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Both suspects were apparently well known to French police and their names have been on U.S. ''no-fly'' terror lists for years, the U.S. official said.
Alleged accomplice Hamyd Mourad, 18, surrendered to police.
The Kouachi brothers are French citizens, born in Paris to parents of Algerian descent. Their parents are dead, according to the French newspaper Le Monde.
While authorities were retracing Said's travels, Cherif's legal problems left a public trail that passed through a fish store where he once worked, to an Islamist crew he worked with to recruit fighters for al-Qaeda, and prison, where he met a mentor.
Chérif was delivering pizzas in the 19th district, a working-class eastern Paris neighborhood that is home to many families of North African descent, when he appeared in a 2004 documentary on French public television. At the time, according to the documentary, many French Muslims were angered by the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and by the the death of Iraqi civilians and the abuse of detainees by American captors.
The footage showed him in a black T-shirt with very short hair and a chunky wristwatch. It portrayed him as more interested in pretty girls than going to the mosque. He appeared relaxed and chatting with friends, and rapping and dancing to music.
Around that time, Cherif met Farid Benyettou, a radical street preacher, according to court records revealed in 2008. Cherif helped Benyettou recruit, train and send at least a dozen young men to fight with al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Police arrested Kouachi in 2008 days before he planned to leave for Iraq via Syria. Cherif's lawyer at the time argued that his client had gotten involved with the wrong crowd and was a reluctant participant. But Cherif became closed off and unresponsive, and started growing a beard after his time in prison from January 2008 and October 2009, Cherif's former attorney, Vincent Ollivier told Le Parisien Thursday.
Le Monde reported that Chérif found a new mentor in prison, Djamel Beghal, who was serving a 10-year sentence for a failed plot to attack the U.S. Embassy in Paris in 2001.
When Chérif got out, he worked in a fish store and reestablished contact with his old crew. He also married on March 1, 2008, and made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Said Kouachi was the only witness.
In 2010, Cherif was arrested again, accused by France's Anti-Terrorism Directorate of participating in a failed plot to free another Jihadist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem. Belkacem is serving a life sentence after his 2002 conviction in a 1995 bombing of a rail station museum, which killed eight people. At the time, Belkacem was a member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, which sought to establish an Islamic state in Algeria.
Investigators found among Cherif's possessions a book denouncing the concept of democratic Islam, and other writings that reject "religious compromise with power," and that justify jihad and martyrdom.
The brothers also have a radical relative, Baboubaker Al-Hakim, Le Monde reported. Al-Hakim claimed responsibility on behalf of Tunisian al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al Sharia for the the 2013 assassinations of two Tunisian politicians who opposed Islamist rule. Al Hakim had traveled to Iraq four times and is a co-founder of the Qaeda recruiting crew that Cherif later joined.
