Boko Haram Attack on Nigerian Village Leaves 2,000 Dead; Boko Haram Straps Explosives to 10-Year-Old Girl, Kills 20; Parting Shots:  Palestinians Celebrate First Match of Asian Cup
ANDERSON: Welcome back to what is a very chilly evening in Jerusalem, a special edition of CONNECT THE WORLD with me, Becky Anderson. The headlines for you this hour. A Turkish news agency reports one of the main suspects wanted in connection with last week's terror attacks in France may be in Syria. Hayat Boumeddiene is said to have traveled to Turkey five days before the first attack in Paris. Turkish officials say she then headed for Syria. The French government says it's rolling out a massive increase in security in response to the terror attacks. French media report that 10,000 soldiers and 8,000 police officers are being deployed across the country. More than half of those police officers will be stationed at Jewish schools. And some news just coming into CNN. Sharif Kouachi, one of the three men blamed for last week's attacks, his wife in Paris says she condemns her husband's actions. That statement coming through to us here from her attorney. Divers have recovered the latest of the flight data recorder from AirAsia Flight 8501. This is a major breakthrough in the effort to determine what downed the passenger jet in the Java Sea. As the world reels from events in Paris, in Nigeria, another tragedy has been unfolding. Details still very sketchy. Amnesty International calls it Boko Haram's deadliest massacre to date. Local officials say up to 2,000 people were killed in the town of Baga. Amnesty believes the death toll may be even higher. This is in Northern Nigeria near the border with Chad, and some residents attempted to swim across Lake Chad to escape the militants. They, though, drowned. Other people tried to flee on land. Survivors now report that the bodies litter the brush. CNN's Nic Robertson is in Nigeria covering the latest of what is possibly Boko Haram's brutality. Just today 20 people were killed in a market. Nic, what do we know?</s>NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, the killing in that market was perhaps one of the most dastardly tricks, if you will, by Boko Haram so far, strapping explosives onto a young girl who was believed to be around 10 years old, according to some eyewitnesses. And then as she approached a security checkpoint in the town of Maiduguri, blowing up the explosives that she was wearing, killing 20 people, injuring many more around them. But they didn't just use that tactic Saturday. They used that same tactic on Sunday in the town of Potiskum, again, not far away, down the same major highway. And there, they used two girls, putting explosives on them, young girls, then blowing up those explosives as they got near the security checkpoints, three people killed, 43 wounded there. And that's coming right after we're getting the reports of this major offensive on the town of Baga, many of who the sort of 20 -- the 30,000 people have been displaced there, not just trying to swim across the lake to Chad, but displaced internally in Nigeria in the town of Maiduguri, where that bombing took place with the young girl on Saturday. So, they're being hit coming backwards and forwards here if you will. But eyewitness talk, indeed, of a killing spree lasting three days, of burning, of looting by Boko Haram, of overrunning a significant and strategic army outpost in that area. And then, witnesses say, walking past body after body after body, mile after mile after mile on their roads trying to escape, Becky.</s>ANDERSON: Dreadful story. Nic Robertson on it for you. Thanks, Nic. Well, leaders from all over the world gathered in Paris at the weekend to condemn the terror attacks there, including Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There are now reports that France asked him not to attend. "Haaretz" newspaper reports that the prime minister agreed not to go, but then changed his mind when the Israeli economy and foreign ministers said they would attend. They are all preparing for the upcoming election. So, did France not want a political sideshow overshadow its national tragedy? Well, for more on this, I'm joined by David Horowitz. He is the founding editor of "the Times of Israel." Certainly CNN has been told by the spokesman for Netanyahu today that it wasn't that the French didn't want him to attend, it was an issue of logistics and security that the Elysee Palace were concerned about, and that was something the Israelis were able to put to rest in the French minds. Do you buy that?</s>DAVID HOROWITZ, FOUNDING EDITOR, "THE TIMES OF ISRAEL": Not entirely. It would -- you'd think that the leader of the world's only Jewish state would have been a guest that France would have been very anxious to have come to a solidarity rally for 17 people, for of whom were members of the French Jewish community.</s>ANDERSON: That's exactly what the prime minister's spokesman told us, that it was important that Netanyahu was there to support not just the French, but the French Jewish community, many of whom, we are hearing, may be making their way in the future here. There are already thousands of French Jews who live, for example, in Ashdod on the coast here. An open offer to make Aliyah or to come and take Israeli citizenship by Netanyahu. Should we be surprised by that?</s>HOROWITZ: No, I don't think so. This is the only Jewish state on the planet. It was tragically revived too late to save 6 million Jews from the Nazi Holocaust, but it has been a country of refuge for Jews in persecute areas: the Middle East and North Africa. And when Israel looks to France and sees, well, Jews in some kind of trouble, shall we say, it stresses that the door is open.</s>ANDERSON: Two issues, though. Many will say Palestinians have no chance of an option like Aliyah, for example. They have no state, nowhere to come back to. It also begs the question of where those French Jews might be welcomed to. Where would they be accommodated? And would that provide more grist for the mill of what is a very controversial policy by the Israeli government, one that has been denigrated, to a certain extent, by the UN, even back in November, of the expansion of settlements here?</s>HOROWITZ: See, I don't think it's about either of those issues at all. I think most Israelis want to partner with the Palestinians to some kind of an accommodation. And when the Palestinians have their independence, their refugees would become citizens of the Palestinian state in the same way that Jewish refugees are given citizenship in Israel. And as for the notion of this being somehow settlement connected, there's a lot of room in Israel. It's a small country, but as you say, there are French people living in Ashdod, there are French people living all over the country. There's the whole Negev and the Galilee where there's plenty of room for people to live. We're not talking about that many people in a country of 8 million. We're talking about a concerned prime minister, a question of how sensitive or insensitive he is in making that kind of offer as overtly as he has. But saying, remember, the Jewish state is here if you need it.</s>ANDERSON: And an open invitation to the families of those who lost their lives at the Kosher supermarket last week. Those bodies will arrive here, we believe, in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. The funeral ceremonies to be held just about five minutes from here in what is the biggest cemetery in West Jerusalem. The funeral services expected to be attended by the prime minister, the president, and many religious leaders. A very sad day for those families.</s>HOROWITZ: I think so. And remember, the reason why this resonates so much in Israel is because they were targeted in this case because they were Jews. We know that the gunman, he told a French journalist at the height of the siege that he was deliberately targeting Jews. There was information found on his person suggesting he might have wanted to target Jewish schools, other sites. That's why there's this outpouring of emotion and identification from Israel for that Jewish community.</s>ANDERSON: Should this not provide, though, at this point, as good an opportunity as any to revive the Middle East peace process, something that many people will say is the fulcrum, is the reason why we see the sort of anti-Semitism that we are witnessing in France and in many other places around the world, and the Islamophobia by some on the other side. It's an issue that comes right back to here. And the question, for example, of Jerusalem.</s>HOROWITZ: I think when you look at the first of the terror attacks, last Wednesday's, you recognize that Islamic extremism is not rooted in despair over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That strikes at the --</s>ANDERSON: They would use it as an excuse.</s>HOROWITZ: OK, yes they would, but that's -- the goal here is something much more pernicious. They're out to destroy freedom of expression, Western freedoms. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the peace process, Israel has been trying to partner the Palestinians towards an accommodation, but relatively moderate Mr. Abbas, who marched in that rally yesterday, is allied in the current Palestinian government with Hamas, which is committed to destroying Israel. Kind of hard for Israel to negotiate with them.</s>ANDERSON: Let me ask you very briefly, yes or no, was Naftali Bennett right to say that it was an act of hypocrisy for Abbas to be there with his arms joined with other world leaders in defiance of those extremists?</s>HOROWITZ: I think he was pointing to a wider concern that Europe, France, much of the international community, is disinclined to acknowledge the dangers posed by Islamic extremism. And surprisingly, in fact, somebody who has come out and said, hey, we've got a problem here, was the Egyptian president, who's talking about the need for a revolution in thinking in Islam.</s>ANDERSON: A religious revolution, you're exactly right. Just days before the attacks in Paris last week, that is exactly what President el- Sisi called for. Sir, always a pleasure.</s>HOROWITZ: Thank you.</s>ANDERSON: Thank you very much, indeed, for joining us. Well, investigators in -- looking into those Paris attacks are following several leads. We heard earlier about the Syria link to that attack, but there's also a possible connection to Yemen. A security source there tells CNN that at least one of the Kouachi brothers spent time there. Nick Paton Walsh has been following that part of the story for us, and he joins us now from Beirut. Nick?</s>NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Becky, as investigators piece together the history of these two brothers and their associates, it is remarkable quite how many times they would have appeared on watch lists, on the intelligence radar. But one remarkable fact is, in the city of Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, where according to one man that CNN has spoken to who met Said Kouachi there in 2011, he in fact was briefly the roommate of one of the most notorious attempted bombers of the past decade, the so-called "Underwear Bomber," who tried to target a plane to Detroit in 2009. Here is the place where they briefly lived together.</s>WALSH (voice-over): During multiple alleged trips to Yemen, Said Kouachi, the older of two brothers behind the Paris attacks, made some extraordinarily high-profile friends, it is said. A local witness tells CNN he briefly roomed with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a plane to Detroit in December, 2009. In these winding streets, Kouachi studied Arabic grammar at a local institute, and sometimes played football with children. This is where, in 2011, Kouachi met this researcher, Mohammed al-Kibsi.</s>MOHAMMED AL-KIBSI, RESEARCHER: And he was the only adult among them that day. They were making a (inaudible) there, studied in an institute a little bit down there. And he lived, Umar Farouk, at that place.</s>WALSH: He shows our producer the institute lodgings where he says the Paris gunman and the Underwear Bomber shared an apartment for a week or two, probably in 2009. The lodgings are closed to us, but Kibsi remembers what Kouachi told him about the Underwear bomber.</s>AL-KIBSI: That Farouk was a very quiet person, and he rarely talked to people.</s>WALSH: Those former lodgings are now office space, the school closed down. Despite this link to one of the most famous attempted bombers of the last decade, somehow, quiet Kouachi later fell off the French intelligence radar.</s>AL-KIBSI: He was a very nice guy. Very cheerful, polite.</s>WALSH: One Yemeni official tells CNN Kouachi met al Qaeda loyalists in Sanaa. The streets of the capital perhaps holding so many secrets about how the Paris attackers learned their brutality.</s>WALSH: Becky, in the last few hours, we've learned that it wasn't just Said, in fact, who went to Yemen. One Yemeni security official telling us that the brother, Sharif, also was there at the same time as Said for a period of about three months, they believe, from April 2011, just after that man, Mr. Mohammed al-Kibsi, met Kouachi playing football in those streets. Now, what they believed Sharif did is, perhaps, different to what they thought Said did. They don't think Sharif went to that language school, those schools in Sanaa, the capital. They think instead, perhaps, he traveled north toward Saada, towards perhaps an Islamic school in a town there called Dammaj and believed, too, this Yemeni security official. And I have to say, Yemen's been really, I think, struggling to put forward a unified picture of what they think happened. But this official believes that maybe that town, Dammaj, was close to some al Qaeda- affiliated training camp that Sharif may have visited. A lot still to be unearthed in Yemen, but quite clear, these two brothers went there at the same time, and Said, it's said, on a number of occasions. That surely should have tipped off French authorities more than the case that it seems to be now. Becky?</s>ANDERSON: Nick Paton Walsh reporting for you. Well, wherever the investigation leads, some Muslims have expressed concern that the Paris attacks were not seen and just weren't anticipated. Well, coming up, we'll hear from the family of a blogger who was publicly flogged in Saudi Arabia, away from the Paris story for you. But some sense of connection as well. We'll tell you why coming up.