Brothers by blood, brothers-in-arms

The fact that Said and Cherif Kouachi, the two men accused of carrying out the deadly attacks at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were brothers should come as no surprise, experts say.

“The history of terrorism is replete with pairs of brothers and sisters operating together,” University of Massachusetts Lowell criminology professor John Horgan told AFP. “It’s actually far more common than people realise.” Radical groups may actually aim for recruiting siblings to fight side by side. There were three pairs of brothers among the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. In November 2012, the Qazi brothers were arrested for planning a bomb attack in New York. After Mohammed Merah killed seven people at a Jewish school in Toulouse in March 2012, his brother was arrested as an accomplice. And the three Duka brothers were jailed for life in the United States for plotting to kill soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix. “We have plenty of examples across the terrorism spectrum, of multiple kinds of terrorism in Indonesia, Northern Ireland, West Asia,” said Prof. Horgan, who previously directed a centre for terrorism and security studies at Pennsylvania State University.

More recently, the Tsarnaev brothers carried out the deadly bombing at the Boston marathon finish line, with the youngest facing a possible death sentence at his trial now under way. And in Canada, the Larmond brothers were arrested on Friday on terror-related charges. These same blood ties linked the two men who stormed into the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris with guns this week. Said Kouachi, 34, and Cherif, two years younger, gunned down 12 people before being killed by police after a two-day manhunt and a hostage standoff.

“Together, they formed a hermetic bubble, a molecule of extremism,” said University of Maryland psychology professor Arie Kruglanski. Between brothers and sisters, “there’s a social connection that reinforces realities”.