Paris ( CNN ) French authorities knew alarming details about two of the terrorists in the Paris attack as recently as a year ago , according to court documents obtained by CNN . The documents show that Amedy Coulibaly and Cherif Kouachi were close associates and go into explicit detail on how the two Paris attackers plotted to stage a prison break to free a fellow terrorist in 2010 . Coulibaly , who is accused of killing a French police officer and killing four more people at a kosher grocery store , was described as a logistics expert in charge of accumulating weapons and arms for the prison break plot . Records show when he was arrested in 2010 , police found `` a huge cache of high-caliber arms , '' including 240 cartridges for machine guns for `` the specific goal of seriously hurting people through intimidation or terror acts . '' Police also found computers with security and encryption and recipes for poison purportedly capable of killing a million people . Cherif Kouachi , accused of killing 12 people after attacking the Charlie Hebdo magazine last week with his brother , was implicated in the prison plot , but he denied involvement and was not jailed for that . Kouachi and Coulibaly had a mentor in common , a radical named Djamel Beghal . Once known as al Qaeda 's premiere European recruiter , Beghal was convicted of conspiring to attack the U.S. Embassy in Paris . Kouachi had met Beghal in prison , and once they were freed , he would visit him with Coulibaly , bringing Beghal food and money -- and sometimes spending days at his apartment . Also part of the visits was Coulibaly 's partner , Hayat Boumeddiene , who 's now on the run and wanted by police . Court documents detail how Kouachi and Coulibaly plotted together , hiding their conversations by using code names over disposable cell phones . But what about Beghal ? Does he have any direct connection to last week 's attacks ? And what happened to him ? Beghal was first arrested in Dubai in 2001 for his role in the embassy plot . He was in custody until his trial and conviction in 2005 , then released on house arrest in 2009 . After Beghal 's release , French authorities collected more than 45,000 pages of wire transcripts and surveillance images of him , including when he was under house arrest . The images include a 2010 photo of Beghal with Cherif Kouachi and two other men , in a park . And a second photo , also taken in 2010 , is of Beghal with Coulibaly , who visited the recruiter in Cantal , France , with Boumeddiene . A Western intelligence source verified the authenticity of the images obtained by CNN . Beghal 's time out of prison did n't last long . In 2010 , he was arrested and charged with involvement in same prison-break plot that landed Coulibaly in prison . He was sentenced to 12 years in prison and remains behind bars . Beghal 's ties to al Qaeda stretch back before the 9/11 attacks in the United States against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon , the source said . In November 2000 , Beghal traveled to Afghanistan for eight months , also visiting Pakistan . According to court records , he was put in charge of the plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris -- an attack eerily similar to the 1998 attacks against U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania . The Western intelligence source says Beghal was given instructions to go to Dubai and then Morocco , where he would lose his old passport and get a new one . He was then instructed to travel to Spain where he would be given the equivalent of $ 60,000 to carry out the Paris attack on the U.S. Embassy . But Begahl was stopped and questioned as he passed through Dubai . According to the Western intelligence source , he confessed during interrogation to the planned attack on the embassy . He was ultimately convicted in a French court . U.S. authorities never brought charges against the French-Algerian as they did other al Qaeda operatives involved in 1998 attacks on U.S. Embassies in East Africa . Beghal 's mentor was Finsbury Park mosque cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri , convicted just last week on terrorism charges and sentenced to life by a federal judge in New York . Abu Hamza is believed to have radicalized and influenced convicted terrorists shoe-bomber Richard Reid and 9/11 's Zacarias Moussaoui . The source says Beghal later took the name Abu Hamza out of respect for his mentor . CNN 's Tim Lister contributed to this report .
The man who was once al Qaeda 's top European recruiter was a mentor to Coulibaly and Kouachi . Court documents reveal details about the relationships between the attackers .