Police have been hunting for Ms. Boumeddiene since her partner, Amedy Coulibaly, was identified as the alleged shooter of a policewoman on Thursday and stormed a Parisian kosher grocery on Friday, leaving four hostages dead.
French prosecutors have described Ms. Boumeddiene as a dangerous individual who has trained to use firearms.
Ms. Boumeddiene left France and crossed into Syria from Turkey, the people said, before the French capital was plunged into a three-day spree of violence that began with the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine Wednesday.
A senior Turkish official said Ms. Boumeddiene flew to Turkey with one companion on Jan. 2, landing at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport. The official would not name her travel companion but said Turkish intelligence officials were in constant contact with their French counterparts.
This photo released on Friday the French police shows Hayat Boumeddiene, the suspected accomplice of one of the gunmen responsible for terror attacks in Paris earlier this week. © Provided by The Wall Street Journal.
The pair stayed in Istanbul until Jan. 4, when they flew to the southeastern city of Urfa, and most likely headed to Syria, the official said.
“After Urfa, we lost track of them... most likely they crossed into Syria,” the official said.
“She used no ports or no vehicles to exit turkey that we know of,” he added.
The city of Urfa is known as a way station for foreigners seeking to reach the Syrian battlefield.
It isn’t clear whether Ms. Boumeddiene went to Syria to join one of the radical Islamist groups fighting in the bloody civil war.
In an interview with French news channel BFM TV on Friday, before he was killed by police, Mr. Coulibaly said he had acted on behalf of Islamic State, the insurgency that controls large swaths of Syria and Iraq.
The French Justice Ministry on Friday issued a wanted notice for Ms. Boumeddiene and Mr. Coulibaly in connection with the murder of a policewoman near Paris on Thursday and the attack Wednesday on Charlie Hebdo.
But the authorities said late Friday that there was no indication Ms. Boumeddiene was present at the grocery store siege after some media reports had said she was with Mr. Coulibaly at the time.
The wanted notice included a photograph of Ms. Boumeddiene with her face and hair exposed but other images purported to be of her, reprinted widely in French media, show a woman clad from head to toe in a black robe and face covering. In some of the images, shown alongside photos of Mr. Coulibaly apparently at the same forested location, the woman is shown firing a weapon resembling a crossbow.
On a French Internet forum in November about a French law forbidding head scarves worn by many Muslim woman, a person signing herself as Hayat Boumeddiene attacked the French law and said Islamic law took precedence. Links between the entry and the wanted woman couldn’t be established.
Ms. Boumeddiene, 26 years old, was one of seven children who grew up in an economically depressed Parisian suburb, according French media. Her mother died when she was 6, her father struggled to support his family and Ms. Boumeddiene was put in the custody of French social services, according to the French daily Le Parisien. Attempts to reach Ms. Boumeddiene’s father were unsuccessful.
Ms. Boumeddiene later became romantically involved with Mr. Coulibaly and the two in 2009 held a religious wedding ceremony, according to Le Parisien. They weren’t married in a civil ceremony so weren’t considered legally married.
Ms. Boumeddiene had been in “constant and sustained” contact with Chérif Kouachi’s wife, exchanging more than 500 phone calls last year, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Friday. Mr. Kouachi’s wife was taken into custody on Wednesday, prosecutors said.
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