Armed and masked anti-terrorism police swooped on woodland villages northeast of Paris in a manhunt for two brothers suspected of being the Islamist gunmen who killed 12 people at a French satirical weekly.
A day after the Paris attack, officers carried out house-to-house searches in the village of Corcy, a few km from a service station where police sources said the brothers were sighted in ski masks. Helicopters flew overhead.
The 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 an Islamist cell. Police said they were «armed and dangerous».
In Paris, a policewoman was killed in a shootout with a gunman wearing a bulletproof vest, setting a tense nation further on edge. Police sources were unable to say whether that incident was linked to the previous day’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. 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 and 1970s.
The newspaper had been firebombed in the past for printing cartoons that poked fun at militant Islam and some that mocked the Prophet Muhammad himself. Two of those killed were police posted to protect the paper.
While world leaders described the attack as an assault on democracy, al Qaeda’s North Africa branch praised the gunmen as «knight(s) of truth».
Many European newspapers either re-published Charlie Hebdo cartoons or lampooned the killers with images of their own.
Searches were taking place in Corcy and the nearby village of Longpont, set in thick forest and boggy marshland about 70 km north of Paris, but it was not clear whether the fugitives who had been spotted in the area were holed up or had moved on.
«We have not found them, there is no siege,» an interior ministry official in Paris said.
Corcy residents looked bewildered as heavily armed policeman in ski masks and helmets combed the village meticulously from houses to garages and barns.
«We’re hearing that the men could be in the forest, but there’s no information so we’re watching television to see,» said Corcy villager Jacques.
In neighbouring Longpont, a resident said police had told villagers to stay indoors because the gunmen may have abandoned their car there. Anti-terrorism officers pulled back as darkness fell. The silence was broken by the sound of a forest owl.
Source: Buenos Aires Herald