The family lives in a ground-floor apartment across the street from the north bank of the La Villette basin: an urban waterway alive with boats, bridges and bike paths. Gray-haired Frenchmen play boccie by a tree-lined promenade named for the actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.
Riquet is on the northeastern edge of Paris in the 19th arrondissement, or district, whose population runs the ethnic gamut: Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Asians, Orthodox Jews, Turks and a large concentration of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
The area is socioeconomically diverse as well. Crime and low-income housing abound, but gentrified sections attract the French equivalent of yuppies. Salah lived near a kosher pizzeria and a cafe/bike shop that offers bicycles and repairs as well as espresso and hot chocolate.
Salah's Muslim family was attached to its religion and homeland. His older brothers would go back to Mali for extended stays. Salah was calm and focused and became very religious about the age of 12.
"After 9 p.m., you'd find him and his crew at the mosques, not on the street," said Bakary Sakho, 25, a founder of Good Boys of Africa who knows Salah's family well. "He didn't have trouble with the police. He was a young, serious Muslim. He did his five prayers a day. He wore the traditional vestments at the mosque, but around the neighborhood he wore jeans and basketball shoes like everybody else."
Salah told people he was determined to be an imam, friends and judicial sources say. When Salah and his longtime neighbor, Chiakhou Diakhabi, decided this year to study at a Koranic school in Syria, their parents were pleased. Diakhabi, a son of Senegalese immigrants, found religion after years of scrapes with the police.
Many African and Arab families in Riquet, and elsewhere in France, see rediscovering Islamic heritage as a calming, stabilizing experience that keeps kids off the street.
"The parents thought it was a good idea," Sakho said. "Being an imam, that means discipline. For these families, a Koranic school in Syria was a big deal -- like a university."
The 19-year-old Diakhabi had a strong influence on Salah. Their fathers are close friends, and the families live in the same apartment complex.
In France and other European countries, adolescents from Muslim families increasingly turn to rigorous practice of Islam, often a badge of cultural identity for second- and third-generation youths from immigrant families who feel marooned in Western society. Youth counselors and friends didn't think Salah had become an aggressive extremist.
