 |
| Cherif, left, and Said Kouachi |
PARIS (AP) — French police hunted Thursday for two heavily armed men — one with a terrorism conviction and a history in jihadi networks — in the methodical killing of 12 people at a satirical newspaper that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. The prime minister announced several overnight arrests and said the possibility of a new attack "is our main concern."
Tensions in Paris were high as France 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. A policewoman died and a street sweeper was wounded. The shooter remained at large.
It was not immediately clear if that shooting was linked to the attack the previous day on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where two police were among the dead.
France's prime minister, Manuel Valls, said the two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo shootings were known to intelligence services, and the fear that they could carry out another attack "is our main concern." Valls told RTL radio there had been several arrests overnight; a security official put the arrest total at seven, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.
Valls said the suspects were likely being tracked by intelligence services, but "there is no such thing as zero risk."
Fears have run high in Europe that jihadis trained in warfare abroad would stage attacks at home. The French suspect in a deadly attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium had returned from fighting with extremists in Syria; and the man who rampaged in the south of 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," President Francois Hollande said Thursday. The attack took place nearly midway between France's Bastille and the enormous Republique plaza.
One of the Charlie Hebdo suspects, Cherif Kouachi, was convicted of terrorism in 2008 for involvement 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 early Thursday, appealing for witnesses after a fruitless search in the city of Reims, in French Champagne country.
A third man, Mourad Hamyd, 18, surrendered at a police station in a small town in the eastern region after learning his name was linked to the attacks in the news and social media, said Paris prosecutor's spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre. She did not specify his relationship to the Kouachi brothers.
More...
