Witnesses come forward with details on Kouachi brothers' childhood

The Kouachi brothers Cherif and Saïd gained notoreity in the last three days of their lives, when they sparked horror and outrage by attacking the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, claiming the lives of 12 people before being shot by French security forces.

Before that however, theirs was a childhood filled with uncertainty and instability. Several people from the Kouachi brothers' past have come forward in the days following the tragedy, giving some insight on the pair's history before they made international headlines.

A worker with a voluntary group, which helped impoverished children in the same council block as the Kouachi family in the 1990s, gave an account of the boys' mother's death.

In 1992, the two brothers, aged 12 and 10, came home from school for lunch to find their mother lying dead in their council flat in north-east Paris.

Her death, although officially described as caused by “illness”, was believed by neighbours to have been a suicide. She was pregnant, for a sixth time.

The volunteer, Evelyne, recalls that the older, quieter Saïd followed his younger brother, who is described as naughty and 'turbulent' to ecological news website Reporterre. 

Evelyne said that she had to “watch Chérif like you watch milk on the stove… [But] I adored that child. You only had to sweet-talk him and take him in your arms and he would calm down. I found him quite touching – under the spell of Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters, like all children.”

After two years with a foster family in Brittany, following the deaht of their mother, the brothers – along with a younger brother and an older sister – were sent in 1994 to an orphanage-school in Corrèze, a beautiful, hilly department of south-west France.

Teachers there recall two unassuming boys who stayed out of trouble and loved football. Saïd remained shy but later came out of his shell to be elected student representative by his peers.

The brothers played football for a local club, AS Chambertoise. Chérif, a striker, was the more talented, even considering a career as a footballer at one stage. “They laughed and played like normal teenagers,” Alain Lascaux, the president of the club, told The New York Times. “Nothing then could have predicted what they did last week. Nothing at all.”

A recollection from one of their peers tells a darker story, of both their development as youths and of the environment they were exposed to.

A childhood friend, who lost touch with the brothers in 2000, when they left the institution, remembers the orphanage being a violent place, with fights happening all the time and with some teachers being afraid of their charges.

The Kouachi brothers, he says, were respected because 'they could handle themselves'.

He remembered the older brother, Saïd, as “very civilised and respectful”, more religious than his brother and “always ready to boot the bum of anyone who did anything stupid”.

The fate of the Kouachi brothers, both buried, at ages 34 and 32, in unmarked graves in different French towns, riddled with gendarmerie bullets, could have been avoided, their friend says.

While he mainly blames brainwashing from sources that prey on youths, he also maintains that the system, which did little to support the brothers once they left the orphanage, was also culpable.