"What happened was disgusting. A lot of guys around here are angry about living here. We don't like the police: they give us a hard time. But it's another thing walking into an office and killing people just like that in the name of God. It's not my God or anyone else's around here."
With its high migrant population and pockets of deprivation, the area has nonetheless proved a fertile recruiting ground for Islamist radicalisers looking for young minds to bend to their cause.
The Kouachi brothers, who were raised in an orphanage in the Breton city of Rennes and returned to the 19th arrondissement in their late teens, are thought to have fallen in with a gang - Buttes Chaumont, named after a mixed neighbourhood. It was run by two self-styled "imams" who combined petty theft with lessons in a perverted vision of the Koran.
The group was implicated in setting up a supply chain of French Muslim men to join international jihadists fighting in Iraq, albeit with varying degrees of success: a suspected combat training programme turned out to be a daily group jog.
But the principal reasons the streets of Pantin-Aubervilliers have long been among the most volatile in the banlieues have little to do with religion. The suburb is one of the most densely populated places in Europe, with 52,000 people squeezed into barely 5kmsq of tenements and high-rise housing blocks. Unemployment runs on average at 20 per cent, rising to 40 per cent in some places.
It was here that years of deprivation and social tension boiled over in the autumn of 2005 into some of the worst rioting seen in France for decades, after the deaths of two young French-Algerian teenagers in the nearby town of Clichy-sous-Bois.
Rachida Hakim, 45, an office manager emerging from a traditional couscous restaurant, said: "If you are looking for the reasons for unhappiness here, it's economic and educational. We have an underclass which is Arab and African. Some will fall into the hands of the jihadists but what you need is to persuade these kids that being French is better, cooler even, than being a fanatic."
Pantin and its neighbours were far from immune yesterday from the anxiety gripping Paris and beyond as the Kouachi brothers continued to evade capture and an apparent copycat attack took place in the south of the city.
An estate agent in Pantin had replaced the housing adverts in its windows with multiple copies of the "Je Suis Charlie" poster expressing solidarity with the murdered staff of the satirical magazine, but it had locked its doors in case of unwanted attention. At the town's railway station a hastily laminated poster reminded commuters that the nation's terror alert had been raised to its highest possible level - "ongoing attack".
Yet millions of euros are being poured into regenerating the area, which hosts the national schools of music and dance amid handsome new glass and steel buildings.
Faty Plaucoste, a Muslim worker at the Sofa estate agent covered in "Je Suis Charlie" posters, said: "This is actually a peaceful neighbourhood. We are tolerant - we have no place for these people [behind the Charlie Hebdo shooting]. I think if the Prophet himself had seen those cartoons he would have taken no notice."
- Independent
