A French journalist who infiltrated a jihadist cell was ordered to carry out a suicide attack on a nightclub and told: “The French must die in their thousands.”
Secret film captured during six months undercover, broadcast last night on Canal+ television, showed Said Ramzi, a pseudonym used by the 29-year-old reporter, winning the confidence of “Allah’s soldiers”.
He used Facebook to contact the cell of aspiring French Islamic State fighters in their twenties. “My goal was to understand what was going on inside their heads,” said Ramzi, a Muslim of north African origin — like most of the French terrorists involved in last year’s atrocities in and around Paris.
He described them as “fast-food Islamists” who knew nothing of their avowed faith.“I never saw any Islam in this affair,” he said. They had, “no will to improve the world” but were “lost, frustrated, suicidal, easily manipulated youths”.
The dozen would-be jihadists, who were arrested by anti-terrorist police in December and January, knew little about religion and were driven by a creed that all “unbelievers” deserved to be killed. The young men cheered news of the November 13 massacres which killed 130 around Paris.
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The video featured conversations with the “emir” of the cell, a French-Turkish citizen named Oussama, who the journalist met at a sports centre near the town of Châteauroux.
“We must hit a military base,” Oussama tells the journalist. “When they are eating, they are all lined up . . . ta-ta-ta-ta-ta,” he added, mimicking gunfire. “Or journalists. BFM, iTélé, they are at war against Islam,” Oussama says referring to French news channels. “Like they did to Charlie [Hebdo magazine]. You must strike them at the heart. Take them by surprise . . . They aren't well protected. The French must die by the thousands.”
Oussama tells the journalist that heaven awaits if he carries out a suicide attack. “Towards paradise, that is the path,” Oussama says with a smile. “Come, brother, let’s go to paradise, our women are waiting for us there, with angels as servants. You will have a palace, a winged horse of gold and rubies.”
Oussama spent five months in jail after being returned by Turkey, where he was detained trying to reach Syria. Like most of the group, he was under surveillance by the DCRI, the French internal intelligence service.
At a meeting in the grimy northern Paris suburb of Stains, a member of the group points to a jet arriving at Le Bourget, the airport used for business jets.
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“With a little rocket launcher, you can easily get one of them . . . you do something like that in the name of Islamic State, and France will be traumatised for a century,” he said.
The pressure grew on Ramzi when he was ordered to retrieve a weapon from a forest and a veiled woman at a railway station brought him orders from Abu Suleiman, an Isis commander who had returned from Syria and whom he never met. “There were instructions on making a suicide vest,” Ramzi told Europe 1 radio yesterday. “I had to attack a nightclub and ‘shoot until death’,” he said.
As the group was rounded up in January, one member sent a text to Ramzi saying: “You’ve had it, man.” He then broke off contact with the cell.
The reporter said that he feared for his life while he was with the group. “They are very paranoid and keep on testing you.” He said that the cell was, “perverting the peaceful Islam of my father. These small-time jihadists think they are avenging the oppressed. In reality they are spineless cowards.”