The wife of one of France’s most notorious jihadists, Peter Cherif, has been charged and provisionally detained, days after her husband was returned to prison after seven years on the run.

Soulef A, who was arrested along with Cherif in Djibouti in mid-December, has been charged with criminal association with terrorists and financing a terrorist enterprise and held pending a hearing on 7 January.

Cherif, 36, who was returned to France in late December and detained, is considered a potential source of valuable information by western intelligence agencies. French authorities have been seeking him since he disappeared in 2011 on the final day of his trial in Paris for fighting in Iraq alongside Al-Qaida in 2004.

He appeared before a French judge on 27 December and was issued with a new charge of terrorist conspiracy before returning to prison to serve the five-year sentence from his original trial.

He was close to the brothers who massacred staff on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. In the same year, Cherif, also known as Abou Hamza, was placed on the US blacklist of foreign terrorists.

Investigators opened a new probe in 2017 into his activities in Yemen, where he joined the senior ranks of the local branch of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The United States considers AQAP to be the jihadist group’s most dangerous branch, and drone strikes on the outfit have increased since Donald Trump became US president in January 2017.

Soulef A was taken into custody on Sunday upon her arrival in France.