Charlie Hebdo suspects cornered inside printing works near Paris
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FRENCH anti-terrorist police last night stormed a small printing works in northern France where the two chief suspects in Wednesday’s attack on a Paris magazine had taken a hostage, explosions and gunfire ringing out around the building.
The local government said the two suspects came out of the building firing on police before being killed. A third gunman who had taken hostages at a Jewish supermarket in Paris and demanding the two be allowed to go free had also been killed, according to the Le Monde newspaper.
The building in the small town of Dammartin-en-Goele, set in marsh and woodland, had been under siege since the gunmen abandoned a high-speed car chase and took refuge there early yesterday. A helicopter hovered overhead.
“At the time of speaking, police forces are in the process, I hope, of apprehending the perpetrators of this act of savagery and making sure they can do no more harm,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said before reports of the suspects’ deaths.
Valls was speaking at the offices of the left-wing daily Liberation, temporarily housing what is left of the Charlie Hebdo team, 10 of whom were killed by the Islamist gunmen in an attack on Wednesday. Two police officers were also killed.
Wednesday’s Paris attack has raised questions about surveillance of radicals, far-right politics, religion and censorship in a land struggling to integrate a five-million Muslim population, the EU’s largest.
Security sources said the chief suspects — two French-born brothers of Algerian origin under siege in Dammartin — were both under surveillance and had been placed on European and US “no-fly” lists.
Charlie Hebdo has long courted controversy with satirical attacks on Islam as well as other religions and political leaders.
A witness said one of the gunmen in Wednesday’s attack was heard to shout “We have killed Charlie Hebdo! We have avenged the Prophet!”
France has been high alert for more attacks since the country’s worst terror attack in decades.
The two sets of hostage-takers apparently knew each other, said a police official.
The two brothers linked to al-Qaida grabbed a hostage early yesterday and were cornered by police inside a printing house in Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris.
The police official said the gunman at the kosher grocery store had been holding at least five hostages and he was believed responsible for the roadside killing of a Paris policewoman on Thursday. Authorities released a photo of him and a female accomplice but were unclear about her whereabouts.
They were named as Amedy Coulibaly, 32, and Hayat Boumeddiene, 26.
At the store near the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood, the gunman burst in with gunfire just a few hours before the Jewish Sabbath began, declaring “You know who I am,” the official recounted.
Police SWAT squads descended on the area and France’s top security official rushed to the scene, as he did the day before when the policewoman was killed. The attack came before sundown when the store would have been crowded with shoppers.
Police said 100 students were under lockdown in schools nearby and the highway ringing Paris was closed.
Hours before and 40 kilometers away, a convoy of police trucks, helicopters and ambulances streamed toward Dammartin-en-Goele, a small town near Charles de Gaulle airport.
“They said they want to die as martyrs,” Yves Albarello, a local lawmaker, told reporters.
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