Yemen-based faction al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) today released a video claiming credit for last week’s attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which left 12 people dead.
The video showed top AQAP figure Nasr Ansi declaring the target as specifically chosen and financed by the group as revenge for the magazine’s portrayals of the prophet Mohammed.
The Kouachi brothers both trained in Yemen, and one of them claimed AQAP support when they carried out the attack, so the video just confirms what was largely already known.
Questions about whether AQAP was responsible were fueled primarily by the secondary attacker, at the Paris kosher grocery store, claiming he was affiliated with ISIS. That still might be the case, but it seems that the initial attackers were almost certainly indeed linked to the Yemeni group.
