2 suspects in French standoff came out shooting—official

Smoke rises from a building in Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris, where the two brothers suspected in a deadly terror attack were cornered, Friday, Jan. 9, 2015. AP

PARIS — Two al-Qaida-linked brothers suspected of slaying 12 people at a Paris newspaper came out with guns blazing Friday, prompting an assault on the printing plant where they had been hold up with a hostage, a French police official said. They were killed and their hostage was freed, authorities said.

Another gunman who took at least five hostages Friday afternoon at a kosher grocery in Paris also died in a nearly simultaneous raid there, said Gael Fabiano of the UNSA police union.

Moments later, several people were seen being led out of the Porte de Vincennes grocery store but security forces could still be seen moving around. It was not clear exactly how many hostages had been at the store or how many were freed.

France has been high alert since the country’s worst terror attack in decades — the massacre Wednesday in Paris at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people dead.

Two groups of terrorists had seized hostages at separate locations around the French capital Friday, facing off against thousands of French security forces as the city shut down a famed Jewish neighborhood and scrambled to protect residents and tourists from further attacks.

By Friday afternoon, explosions and gunshots rang out and white smoke rose outside a printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris, where brothers Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34, had holed up with a hostage.

Security forces had surrounded the building for most of the day. After the explosions, a police SWAT forces could be seen on the roof of the building and one police helicopter landed near it.

Audrey Taupenas, spokeswoman for the town near the Charles de Gaulle airport, said the brothers had died in the clash.

Minutes before the storming, a gunman in a Paris kosher grocery store had threatened to kill his five hostages if French authorities launched an assault on the two brothers, a police official said. The two sets of hostage-takers know each other, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the rapidly developing situations with the media.

Trying to fend off further attacks, the Paris mayor’s office shut down all shops along Rosiers Street in the city’s famed Marais neighborhood in the heart of the tourist district. Hours before the Jewish Sabbath, the street is usually crowded with shoppers — French Jews and tourists alike. The street is also only a kilometer (a half mile) away from Charlie Hebdo’s offices.

At the kosher grocery near the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood in Paris, the gunman burst in shooting just a few hours before the Jewish Sabbath began, declaring “You know who I am,” the official recounted. The attack came before sundown when the store would have been crowded with shoppers.

The official said the gunman is also believed responsible for the roadside killing of a Paris policewoman on Thursday.

Paris police released a photo of the gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, and a second suspect, a woman named Hayet Boumddiene, who the official said was his accomplice.

Several people wounded when the gunman opened fire in the kosher grocery were able to flee and get medical care, the official said.

Police said 100 students were under lockdown in schools nearby and the highway ringing Paris was closed.

Hours before and 40 kilometers (25 miles) away , a convoy of police trucks, helicopters and ambulances streamed toward Dammartin-en-Goele, a small industrial town near Charles de Gaulle airport, to seize the Charlie Hebdo suspects, who had hijacked a car in a nearby town after more than two days on the run.

“They said they want to die as martyrs,” Yves Albarello, a local lawmaker inside the command post, told French television station i-Tele.

Cherif Kouachi, 32, was convicted of terrorism charges in 2008 for ties to a network sending jihadis to fight U.S. forces in Iraq.

A Yemeni security official said his 34-year-old brother, Said Kouachi, is suspected of having fought for al-Qaida in Yemen. Another senior security official said Said was in Yemen until 2012.

Both officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of an ongoing investigation into Kouachi’s stay in Yemen.

Both brothers were also on the U.S. no-fly list, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss foreign intelligence publicly.

 
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