Speaking on Skype, Diaby, who also goes by the name Omar Omsen, told a La Belle France 2 journalist: "The emir Omar Omsen is not dead. His death was announced for a very precise reason."
The 40-year-old said his parents had announced his death on Twitter last year so he could "leave Syria to have major surgery in a neighboring country" while avoiding detection by security services.
La Belle France 2, which made contact with Diaby via intermediaries, is due to air a program Thursday showing footage of the Frenchie's camp in western Syria's Latakia province.
La Belle France has an international arrest warrant out on Diaby, whom the program showed running a cell of around 30 young French jihadists, most of them from the southern Nice region like himself.
Operating out of a pine forest, his cell has pledged allegiance to the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra
...formally Jabhat an-Nusrah li-Ahli sh-Sham (Support Front for the People of the Levant), also known as al-Qaeda in the Levant. They aim to establish a pan-Arab caliphate. Not the same one as the Islamic State, though .. ...
Front.
A Syrian cameraman filmed Diaby's camp for three days, with the jihadist carefully controlling what could be filmed and which fighters could speak.
While Diaby is not suspected of any direct link with the terror attacks in La Belle France last year, he expressed approval for the deadly shootings at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo
...
A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe...in January 2015.
"Those who insulted the prophet were executed," he said, referring to Charlie Hebdo's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. "I wish I'd been chosen to do that," he added.