I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  That night, they drove to the address Aitboulahcen had been given. Abdelhamid Abaaoud stepped from the shadows into a dim streetlight. “This is when I recognized him,” Sonia told authorities. Earlier, Aitboulahcen had shown Sonia and her family a video of Abaaoud in Syria, dragging corpses tied to the back of a truck.

  Abaaoud told Aitboulahcen that he would give her five thousand euros to help him find a hiding place for forty-eight hours and to pay for new suits and shoes for himself and an associate, who stayed out of sight.

  Her anger exceeding her apprehension, Sonia asked Abaaoud whether he was involved in the attacks and why he would be willing to kill so many innocent people.

  “He said we were lost sheep and that he wanted to blow us all up,” Sonia recalled. He added that many other Islamic State acolytes had come back to Europe with him and that the Paris attacks were “nothing compared to what was going to happen for the holidays.”

  As the three walked toward the car, Abaaoud seemed exceedingly nervous. Sonia’s husband—a stranger to Abaaoud—was in the driver’s seat. It looked to them as if Abaaoud was reaching for a weapon. Abaaoud opened the car door and climbed into the back, but the group made it only 150 yards before he suddenly asked them to stop and let him out.

  The women and Sonia’s husband drove off, and Aitboulahcen’s phone rang again. “You can tell the little couple that if they talk my brothers will take care of them,” the caller said. When Aitboulahcen laughingly told Sonia and her husband about it, Sonia’s husband slapped her in the face. He later told me he was so upset and angry that she’d put them in danger that he couldn’t control himself.

  That night, Sonia said, she kept pouring wine for Aitboulahcen “to get her drunk so that she would call the police.” But the ruse didn’t work, and the others in the house were too paralyzed to make a move themselves.

  “I was scared because I thought if the terrorists knew I’d come forward they’d kill me,” Sonia said.

  The next day, when Aitboulahcen left the house, Sonia called the French equivalent of 911. Records indicate that it took more than three hours for the critical tip to prompt a return call from France’s elite counterterrorism squad. She spent much of that evening giving the authorities a detailed account of the meeting with Abaaoud. When she got home, a curious Aitboulahcen asked where Sonia had gone. To dinner and a movie, her friend replied.

  For the next twenty-four hours, Abaaoud remained at large. Aitboulahcen, meanwhile, bought the shoes and suits her cousin wanted.

  As she left home on Tuesday night, “it seemed like she was saying good-bye,” Sonia recalled. “She told me that she loved me, that I’d been a great mother to her, that I would go to heaven.”

  Trying to act normally, Sonia asked Aitboulahcen if she could pick her up later that night. Aitboulahcen gave Sonia the address, which she quickly passed on to the authorities.

  Until we published our story in the Post in April 2016, the public had no idea that the critical tip in the hunt for Abaaoud came from a Muslim woman who now fears she is a target of the Islamic State.

  Video of the Saint-Denis raid includes a female voice pleading to be let out, saying, “I want to leave,” followed by an explosion so powerful it sent debris into the street. At first, French authorities said that Aitboulahcen had detonated a suicide bomb as police closed in, but they later conceded this was not the case. Sonia suspected that she played a role in forcing police to alter that account by calling them and threatening to go public with her role and her interactions with investigators.

  “I heard of Hasna’s death on TV,” Sonia said. “I was devastated. I miss her.”

  Sonia and her husband felt somehow responsible for Aitboulahcen’s death. “I had told the police not to harm Hasna,” she said. “They should have allowed her to leave, she wanted to leave the apartment. You can hear it in the video.”

  “What really gets on my nerves is how people now speak badly about Muslims, though it was me, a Muslim woman, who helped the authorities to find Abaaoud,” Sonia said. “There could have been more attacks otherwise.”

  Sonia believes that people like Abdelhamid Abaaoud drift into the arms of ISIS not because of Islam but because of their broken families and the racism they face in Europe. “I told him, ‘You have killed innocent people. Islam does not allow this,’” she said, opening her dark brown eyes wide. “This is also the reason why I decided to call the police and tell them where he was. He had killed innocent people, and he was going to kill more.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Deepest Cut

  Germany and Morocco, 2016

  My bags were almost packed, and the cabdriver was on his way to pick me up. I was headed to Morocco, where I planned to travel with my parents, visit relatives, and maybe do a little research into my family history. I had already postponed the trip once, a week earlier, when news broke of an attempted coup in Turkey, and I flew there to cover it and the mass arrests that resulted. I needed a vacation. Now, it seemed, I was finally on my way.

  At about 6:00 p.m., as I tossed a few final items into my suitcase, I heard a news update on TV: shots had been fired near the Olympia shopping center in Munich. A few minutes later, my sister Hannan got a call from an aunt who lives there. “Your cousin’s wife works in the H&M store in that mall,” she said. Our relatives in Munich were calling around desperately, trying to figure out what was going on.

  I sent a message to my editors at the Post, letting them know there had been a shooting and that German TV was already suggesting a possible jihadist connection. It had been a bad summer in Europe—the Bastille Day attack in Nice had happened just a week earlier—and we all immediately wondered whether ISIS was involved.

  I dialed my cousin’s wife, Sabiha, the one who worked at the H&M store, and amazingly I reached her. “I’m okay,” she told me. She’d seen the shooter, whom she described as dark-haired and olive-skinned. “He started shooting and we locked the doors and took people away from windows.” Now she, her coworkers, and their customers had crowded into the back of the store, waiting for word from the police.

  We were relieved to learn that she was safe. Then Peter Finn called. It turned out that the Post’s regular correspondent was away; Peter wanted me to change my travel plans and head to Munich. The city is nearly 250 miles from Frankfurt, but we agreed I should go by taxi, as we expected train and air service to be shut down. Fighting off disappointment, I grabbed a few things out of my suitcase and threw them into an overnight bag. “Forget the airport,” I told the cabdriver. “We’re going to Munich.”

  On the road, Hannan called with more news. Another cousin’s son, fourteen-year-old Can, was missing. I called his father, my cousin Hassan, to ask what had happened.

  “He went with his best friend to the Olympia shopping center, and now we can’t reach him,” Hassan said.

  I told him to keep calm and that there were many different reasons why Can might not be able to answer his phone. I asked for the boy’s phone number, hoping that one of my police sources might be able to use it to locate him via GPS. I also double-checked that Can had his wallet on him. I knew there was a lot of confusion and that the Munich police were nervous about the possibility of multiple shooters, so I wanted to make sure they could easily identify him if they needed to. Can, whose name is pronounced Jan, is of Turkish descent, and although he looks more Italian than Middle Eastern, I worried that anyone with dark hair and Mediterranean looks might be mistaken for the shooter or one of his accomplices.

  Hassan told me that he and his wife, Sibel, were headed to the shopping center to look for their son. When we hung up, I texted a longtime police source in Munich to let him know that one of my relatives was missing and that the family would be very grateful for information. “Please could you give me an update? Or is there somebody I could call?” I wrote.

  He called me back and asked who Can was to me and where he had been. Somewhere near the shopping mall, I told him.

  “Okay, I’ll see w
hat I can do,” he said. “Contact me when you reach Munich.”

  While riding in the car, I called every source I could think of, trying to pin down the basics. Was there one shooter or more than one? How many people had been killed or injured? The scene was cloudy with rumors.

  When my cabdriver and I reached the Munich hotel where I’d booked a room, we saw a crowd of people standing outside looking for taxis. Because of the specter of multiple shooters, the police had banned taxis from operating in the city; it was now 11:00 p.m., and people were anxiously trying to get home. One woman was standing near the entrance to the hotel, shouting into her phone, “The city is on lockdown, probably because some shitty Muslim wanted to kill unbelievers again.”

  I glanced at my driver, Malek, a Muslim of Pakistani descent whom I often called when I needed a ride to the airport. He must have seen the mix of anger and shock on my face. Malek parked and I grabbed my bag and climbed out of the car. As I passed the woman with the phone, I couldn’t resist setting her straight. “First of all, not every Muslim is shitty and wants to kill ‘unbelievers,’” I told her. “Secondly, we don’t know who’s behind this yet.” She just looked at me, her mouth open.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Malek, who had come in with me because he needed to use the bathroom.

  “No, we need to worry about these things,” I said, but I didn’t know why I’d spoken to her like that. It must have been some kind of reflex. I chalked it up to being worried about my relatives, especially Can. The latest report was that as many as eight people had been killed. I called Hassan, who said they still hadn’t heard anything about their son. I could tell he was trying to stay calm, but his voice was strained.

  “Is it true that eight people died?” I texted my police source. “Can we meet?”

  “Not yet,” came the response.

  We picked up my aunt Emel and her son, then drove to a stadium near the shopping center where the police had asked families waiting for information about missing loved ones to gather. In happier times, soccer tournaments were held there, but now the cavernous space was mostly empty. We roamed around for a while looking for the meeting point, which turned out to be a big hall stacked with benches where spectators ordinarily watched sporting events. Aid workers from the Red Cross and Caritas, along with volunteers, had set out food and drinks for the waiting families. They kept lists of who was missing and who was waiting, but they didn’t have much information. Mostly, they tried to make sure people didn’t get too upset or dehydrated.

  Every once in a while, a bus would arrive full of people who had been rescued from the Olympia shopping center. With each arriving bus, my spirits wilted a little more. It’s really late, I thought. Why isn’t he on one of these buses? He should be here. I tried to console myself with the idea that he might have been injured and taken to a hospital and that in the confusion they’d forgotten to tell us, but I had a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. We watched people step off buses into the joyful embrace of their families and happily make their way home.

  I texted my police source again but got no answer. When I called, he didn’t pick up. Something felt wrong. My pulse quickened. Why wasn’t he getting back to me?

  Hassan’s wife, Sibel, was pale. We embraced. “Have you heard anything new?” she asked, her tone pleading. I told her I hadn’t. “There were many more people here, but their family members were already brought in by bus, and they went home,” Sibel told me. “I don’t understand why my son isn’t here yet.”

  Hassan hugged me and whispered in my ear, “One of the people said there is only one more bus coming. I’m praying to God he’s on it.”

  Hassan’s brothers had arrived with their children. Some of the younger ones were monitoring social media on their phones, looking for the latest news and updates from friends. A blond woman, one of the volunteers, approached Sibel. “He’s on the next bus, right?” Sibel begged.

  The woman nodded. I could see hope returning to Sibel’s face. “Alhamdulillah, Can is coming on the next bus,” she told us.

  “Somebody posted on Facebook that Can is injured!” someone shouted. “They said he is alive and in the hospital.”

  Hassan and Sibel asked one of the volunteers to take them to the hospital mentioned in the Facebook message. The rest of us, including Can’s brother and grandmother, stayed at the stadium, waiting for news.

  I looked at my phone, hoping for a message from my source that would tell me not to worry, that Can was all right, just slightly injured. But there was no message, and my increasingly desperate calls continued to go unanswered. By now, I thought, they probably have a list of the dead. Someone from Caritas told me the police were organizing a press conference.

  At about 1:00 a.m., half a dozen plainclothes police came into the hall. They had grim looks on their faces and papers in their hands. They seemed to be bearing news, but they also looked weighted down, as if whatever they carried was heavy. My stomach began to churn. “How many families are you going to talk to?” I overheard one asking another. A blue-eyed officer with dark grayish hair glanced down at the papers and asked one of the volunteers to point out various people. He seemed to be looking for certain families. I walked up to him.

  “I’m sorry, but are you one of the police officers from the crisis center?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “We have a family member missing. Please, can you tell us anything?”

  He folded the paper he was holding and opened a notebook. “Please give me your name, address, and who is the missing family member.”

  My voice shook as I recited the details. “For full disclosure, you should know I am also a journalist working for the Washington Post,” I told him. “But I’m not asking you these questions as a reporter. I’m asking as a member of the family.”

  He said he understood and asked me to wait while he spoke to someone on his cell phone. My aunt had come to stand next to me, and I pressed her hand while watching the policeman’s face and trying to read his lips as he spoke softly into the phone a few feet away.

  He stared at the ground, and as the conversation continued, he bowed his head further. Finally, he hung up and walked over to us. “Where are Can’s parents?” he asked.

  “They went to look for their child in the hospital,” I said.

  “Aside from you, are there any other family members here?”

  I motioned to my aunt and told him there were others, too. Including family and friends, there were sixteen of us. “Why, do you know anything?”

  He looked at me for a few seconds, then leaned closer and whispered, “I think we need to go to a private room.”

  “Oh, God, please, no.” The words slipped out, because I knew what going to a private room meant. I felt my knees weaken.

  He closed his eyes as if trying to push the moment away. “Please stay calm, gather whoever is here, and let’s all go to another room.”

  We were directed down a flight of stairs into a locker room. The police officer with the blue eyes and one of his female colleagues entered through a separate door. I heard them say something about “McDonald’s” and “shooting” and that they’d found a tall, slim young man whose wallet had an ID card with the name Can Leyla.

  “This young man wouldn’t have made it into the hospital,” the male police officer said. “I am sorry.”

  “What are you saying?” Can’s twenty-one-year-old brother, Ferid, stood up. “You are talking about my brother? Are you saying Can is dead?”

  “I am sorry. Your brother is dead.”

  “The boy was just fourteen years old,” Ferid said. “How is this possible? There must be a mistake.”

  It was only later that I heard the whole story and was able to make sense of it. An eighteen-year-old German-Iranian student named David Sonboly had opened fire at the McDonald’s across from the Olympia shopping center, killing five people inside, including Can. Outside, on Hanauer Strasse, Sonboly shot and killed two pedestrians, then walked to
a nearby electronics store, where he shot and killed another person before crossing the street and entering the shopping mall. Moving from the ground floor through the parking garage, he killed one more person and discharged seventeen rounds into a parked vehicle. Shortly after 6:00 p.m., Sonboly was seen on the parking garage rooftop, where a man living in a neighboring apartment building yelled at him. At least two bystanders filmed this episode on their phones. The police shot at Sonboly, causing him to run through a grassy area leading onto Henckystrasse, where he hid in the stairwell of an apartment building. When he stepped out, the police confronted him, and Sonboly shot himself in the head.

  The whole thing took several hours. When it was done, ten people were dead, most between fourteen and twenty years old; the exception was a forty-five-year-old Turkish mother of two. Although many were German citizens, all were of foreign descent: Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian, or Kosovan. Thirty-six others were injured, ten seriously.

  The locker room filled with screaming. “Oh, my God, how can we tell his parents?” my aunt cried. “They won’t survive this.” We were both weeping. I had no idea how or what to tell them. It was unthinkable.

  The police officer walked over to me. “I need to ask you to call the parents and tell them to come back, but you must stay calm. I don’t want them to hear about this until we have them in a safe place.”

  I was in tears and shaking. But my pain doesn’t matter, I thought. We had to do what we could to help Can’s parents and brother. “I will try,” I answered in a broken voice. I went upstairs, where it was quieter, and dialed Hassan’s phone. He picked up after two rings.

  “Yes, Souad?”

  “Hassan? Where are you?” I tried to keep my voice even.

  “On the bus. We wanted to go to another hospital and look for Can.”

  “No, please can you and Sibel come back here? The police just came, and they want to speak to the families.”