Charlie Hebdo hunt: Suspects surrounded

FE Team | Published: January 10, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

PARIS, Jan 9 (agencies): French police have surrounded a building in a northern town where two Islamists suspected of the Charlie Hebdo massacre have taken a hostage.
Holed up in a small printing business in Dammartin-en-Goele, 35km (22 miles) from Paris, the gunmen reportedly said they were prepared to die.
Shots were fired during a high-speed car chase earlier on Friday, the third day of the manhunt for the attackers.
A shooting has been reported at a kosher business in the east of Paris.
A gunman, believed to be the killer of a policewoman in Paris on Thursday, has taken a hostage at the store, a source told France's AFP news agency.
Earlier, a police source linked the killing of the policewoman to the Charlie Hebdo attack, when 12 people were shot dead and 11 injured.
The suspects, two brothers linked by intelligence officials to militant groups, shouted Islamist slogans during the shooting and then fled Paris in a hijacked car, heading north.
It appears that on Friday they hijacked another car in the town of Montagny-Sainte-Felicite before travelling on to Dammartin.
The car's owner recognised them as brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, the key suspects.
In a televised statement Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve confirmed the men being sought on Friday were those wanted for the Charlie Hebdo attack and said they would be "neutralised".
Two brothers suspected of slaughtering 12 people in an Islamist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo seized a hostage Friday as police cornered the gunmen northeast of the capital in a dramatic climax to the manhunt.
Meanwhile, questions mounted as to how a pair well-known for jihadist views could have slipped through the net and attack Charlie Hebdo.
Cherif Kouachi was a known jihadist convicted in 2008 for involvement in a network sending fighters to Iraq.
Said, his brother, has been "formally identified" as the main attacker in Wednesday's bloodbath. Both brothers were born in Paris to Algerian parents.
A senior US administration official told AFP that one of the two brothers was believed to have trained with Al-Qaeda in Yemen, while another source said that the pair had been on a US terror watch list "for years".
Meanwhile: France is at "war" with terrorism, but not religion, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Friday as police cornered two suspected Islamist gunmen near Paris.
"We are in a war against terrorism. We are not in a war against religion, against a civilisation," Valls said.
The country has been left reeling after the massacre Wednesday of 12 people at a satirical weekly magazine by two brothers shouting Islamist slogans.
And as a dramatic manhunt saw police corner the suspects in the small town of Dammartin-en-Goele north of Paris, Valls said it would "certainly be necessary to take new measures" to response to extremist threats.