Clad in black and wielding AK-47s, they appeared on television screens around the world as hardened killers, murdering journalists and police officers as they shot their way through Paris yesterday.
Said, 34, and CherifKouachi, 32, who also went by the name Abu Issen, was part of the "Buttes-Chaumont network" that helped send would-be jihadists to fight for al-Qaeda in Iraq after the US-UK invasion in 2003.
He had grown up in an orphanage in Rennes, north-west France, and had trained as a fitness coach before joining his brother in Paris, Liberation newspaper reports. In the capital he worked as a pizza delivery man.
Police detained him in 2005 just as he was about to board a plane for Syria - at the time the gateway for jihadists hoping to fight US troops in Iraq.
In 2008 he was jailed for three years, for his role in sending militants to Iraq, but 18 months of the sentence was suspended, Liberation reports.
A Parisian neighbour, Eric Bade, described Cherif as "well-behaved, friendly, polite, clean-looking and above all, which is very important, he was willing to help old and disabled people".
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Bade said Cherif "wasn't aggressive - he wasn't a crazy zealot, he was a calm person".
'Iraq connections'
The brothers had allegedly frequented a mosque in the Stalingrad district of Paris, where they came under the influence of a radical imam called Farid Benyettou. He reportedly encouraged them to study Islam at his home and at a Muslim centre in their neighbourhood.
A key figure in the Buttes-Chaumont network was Boubaker al-Hakim, a militant linked to al-Qaeda resistance against US forces in Iraq, a French expert on Islamists says.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, an expert at Sciences-Po University in Paris, says a French court jailed Hakim for seven years in 2008, at the same time as Cherif, along with Farid Benyettou, who got six years. That action broke up the jihadist network they had created.
In a blog article (in French) Mr Filiu says Hakim had recruited militants to fight in Falluja, an Iraqi city that became an al-Qaeda stronghold in 2004.
Hakim is also wanted in Tunisia over the murder of two Tunisian left-wing opposition politicians in 2013.
In 2010 Cherif Kouachi was named in connection with a plot to spring another Islamist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, from jail. Belkacem used to be in the outlawed Algerian Islamic Armed Group (GIA) and was jailed for life in 2002 for a Paris metro station bombing in 1995 which injured 30 people.
Said Kouachi, 34, was also named in the Belkacem plot, but the brothers were not prosecuted, for lack evidence.
Said's ID card was found in the brothers' getaway car which they abandoned after the shooting, AFP news agency reports, citing police sources.
May The Souls of The Departed 'Rest In Peace'
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