Revealed: Woman killed during jihadi prison attack worked for British charity boss

From the Sunday Telegraph

A woman who was killed by special forces troops after she stabbed two prison guards worked for the director general of a British charity which hands out millions of pounds to mosques and community groups, The Telegraph can reveal.

Hanane Aboulhana, who smuggled two ceramic knives into the prison holding her husband by pretending to be pregnant, worked as personal assistant to the Director General of Qatar Charity UK (QCUK).

X-Ray scanners at Alencon-Conde-sur-Sarthe prison, in Normandy, failed to detect the knives, which she and Michael Chiolo used to launch their attack after spending the night together in the prison’s conjugal facilities in March.

Aboulhana, who was raised in north eastern France, worked as PA to Ayyoub Abouliaqin, the Director General of QCUK, based at offices off Oxford Street.

The Telegraph disclosed in November 2017 that QCUK’s chief executive was a former Qatari official who founded a website instructing Muslims to hate Jews and Christians. 

QCUK, now called the Nectar Trust, is the British arm of Qatar Charity (QC), a Doha charity which has been designated a proscribed organisation by neighbouring Gulf states.

The charity had been bankrolling the construction of a mosque in Sheffield overseen by a Kuwaiti official who claimed Jews orchestrated the September 11 attacks. The official subsequently ceased to be a director of the mosque.

In August last year the Charity Commission issued a warning about its “independence” over its ties to a Qatari group later designated as a terror organisation by its Gulf neighbours.

Aboulhana grew up one of eight children in the quiet Mulhouse suburb of Illzach, where her  family was described as close and respectable, showing no sign of radical or hard line religious views.  . . Aboulhana appeared to undergo a profound change from the moment she met Michael Chiolo, who was already in prison serving a 30-year sentence for the kidnap and murder of 89-year-old Roger Tarall, a Holocaust survivor he suffocated during an armed robbery of his home near Metz in 2012. 

Aboulhana met Chiolo, 27, after she answered a notice he posted from prison on an Islamic community website saying he was looking for a Muslim wife. It was around this time that she began to wear a full veil and cut off all ties with her family, moving to the Orne region to be closer to the high security prison where he was being held.

The couple launched their attack when Aboulhana pretended to feel ill in order to attract the attention of one of the prison guards.

Shouting “Allahou Akbar” they stabbed two guards with the ceramic knives she had smuggled into the building through the prison’s scanners by hiding them inside her a fake pregnancy suit.

Chiolo was injured and Aboulhana was shot dead by French anti-terrorist RAID officers as she appeared to throw a substance at them when troops stormed the section of the prison where they were holed up.

Prosecutors established that the couple had wanted to avenge the Islamist terrorist Cherif Chekatt, who was killed in a shoot out with police two days after launching an attack on the Christmas market in Strasbourg in December 2018 in which he killed five people and injured 11.

A spokesman for the Nectar Trust denied that either it or the Qatar Charity UK had ever employed Aboulhana but was unable to confirm whether she had ever worked for its former Director General..