French hunt for two after attack on magazine
HIGH ALERT:Authorities have detained seven people over the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ attacks, as police warned that the two main suspects are ‘armed and dangerous’
AP, PARIS
With tensions high across Paris, authorities yesterday hunted for two heavily armed brothers they feared would strike again after the methodical killing of 12 people at a satirical newspaper that caricatured the Prophet Mohammed.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the possibility of a new attack “is our main concern” and announced several overnight arrests as the country began a day of national mourning.
The most senior security official abandoned a top-level meeting after just 10 minutes to rush to a shooting on the city’s southern edge that killed a policewoman. The shooter remained at large and it was not immediately clear if her death was linked to Wednesday’s deadly attack on the Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo, where two police were among the 12 dead.
Valls said the two suspects still at large in the Charlie Hebdo slayings — Cherif Kouachi, 32, and his 34-year-old brother Said Kouachi — were known to intelligence services and preventing them from carrying out another attack “is our main concern.”
Police swarmed a gas station in the northern Aisne region, where the two men were reportedly spotted early yesterday, and helicopters hovered above the site.
Valls told RTL radio several people had been arrested overnight; a security official put the total at seven, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. A third suspect in the Charlie Hebdo killings has already turned himself in.
Fears have run high in Europe that jihadists trained in warfare abroad would stage attacks at home. The French suspect in a deadly attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium last year had returned from fighting with extremists in Syria; and the man who rampaged in southern France in 2012, killing three soldiers and four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse, received paramilitary training in Pakistan.
“France has been struck directly in the heart of its capital, in a place where the spirit of liberty — and thus of resistance — breathed freely,” French President Francois Hollande said yesterday.
The attack on Wednesday took place midway between France’s Bastille and the city’s enormous Republique plaza.
At noon yesterday, the Paris metro came to a standstill and people gathered in homage near Notre Dame cathedral fell silent to honor the victims.
One of the Charlie Hebdo suspects, Cherif Kouachi, was convicted of terrorism in 2008 for being involved in a network sending radical fighters to Iraq. He and his brother, Said, should be considered “armed and dangerous,” French police said in a bulletin, appealing for witnesses after a fruitless search in the city of Reims, in French Champagne country.
A third man, Mourad Hamyd, 18, surrendered at an eastern police station after learning his name was linked to the attacks in the news, the Paris prosecutor spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre said. She did not specify his relationship to the Kouachi brothers.
France raised its terror alert system to the maximum and bolstered security with more than 800 extra soldiers guarding media offices, places of worship, transport and other sensitive areas.
Fears arose that the deadly attack would ignite a backlash against France’s large and diverse Muslim community.
A mosque in the city of Le Mans, 200km southwest of Paris, was hit overnight with training grenades and gunfire, local prosecutor Philippe Varin said.
No one was in the building at the time and no one was injure
