PARIS: Heavily armed anti-terrorist police teams swooped on woodland villages northeast of Paris on Thursday in a manhunt for two brothers suspected of being the gunmen who killed 12 people at a French satirical weekly.
About 25 helmeted and masked officers carried out house-to-house searches in the villages of Corcy and Longpont, set in thick forest and boggy marshland about 70km north of Paris.
Corcy is a few kilometres from a service station where, according to police, the brothers were sighted in ski masks. Helicopters flew overhead.
“We have not found them, there is no siege,” an interior ministry official in Paris said. “There were just some witness accounts, so we are checking.”
The two fugitive suspects are French-born sons of Algerian-born parents, both in their early 30s, and already under police surveillance. One was jailed for 18 months for trying to travel to Iraq a decade ago to fight as part of a cell. Officials said they were armed and dangerous.
In Paris, a policewoman was killed in a shootout with a gunman wearing a bulletproof vest. Police sources were unable to say whether that incident was linked to Wednesday’s assault at the Charlie Hebdo weekly newspaper, but the authorities opened another terrorism investigation.
Bewildered and tearful French people held a national day of mourning, and the bells of Notre Dame pealed for those killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a left-leaning slayer of sacred cows whose cartoonists have been national figures since the Parisian counter-cultural heyday of the 1960s.
The newspaper had been firebombed and hacked in the past for printing cartoons that poked fun at Muslim militants and some that mocked the Holy Prophet (pbuh) himself. Two of those killed were policemen posted to protect the paper. One witness described scenes of “carnage”.
World leaders described the attack as an assault on democracy. Al Qaeda’s Algeria branch praised it, citing a threat by the militant group’s founder against those who mock the Holy Prophet (pbuh).
Many European newspapers either re-published Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons or lampooned the killers with images of their own.
Meanwhile, Thursday’s shooting of the policewoman on the streets of Paris _ whether related or not _ set the country even further on edge.
The policewoman and a colleague were responding to a traffic accident when the shooting broke out. Witnesses said the assailant fled in a Renault Clio and police sources said he wore a bulletproof vest and had a handgun and an assault rifle.
One police officer at the scene said he did not appear to resemble the Charlie Hebdo shooter suspects.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls was asked on RTL radio after an emergency cabinet meeting with President Francois Hollande whether he feared a further attack.
“That’s obviously our main concern, and that is why thousands of police and investigators have been mobilised to catch these individuals.”
Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2015
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