Paris hostage-taker was on US terror list

Paris hostage-taker Amedy Coulibaly in a video posted online by militants. Photo / AP

The slain hostage-taker who killed four people in a kosher supermarket siege outside Paris last week had been on a US terror watchlist.

Amedy Coulibaly, who is suspected of taking hostages and slaying four Jewish shoppers at the Hyper Cacher supermarket to the east of the city, had been on a US terror database "for a while", a law enforcement official told CNN.

The US network said Coulibaly was on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the government's central repository that includes about one million names.

Coulibaly likely received help from others, including two brothers suspected of shooting dead 12 people at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last week.

US officials said after the attack that the brothers, Cherif and Said Kouachi, had been on a US terror watchlist "for years".

French police say Coulibaly gunned down a policewoman in the suburb of Montrouge and may have shot a jogger on the outskirts of Paris before the bloody supermarket siege.

In a video posted online on Sunday, a man identifying himself as Coulibaly claims responsibility for the Montrouge attack in the name of the Islamic State group, and says he "coordinated" his actions with the Kouachi brothers.

Coulibaly and the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre were killed Friday by police in a dramatic climax to two hostage dramas after three days of terror in the heart of France.

Coulibaly was a repeat criminal offender also convicted for extremist activity.

Meanwhile the bodies of the four French Jews killed by Coulibaly - Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen and Francois-Michel Saada - were on their way to Israel early on Tuesday ahead of a funeral in Jerusalem.

- AFP