Two brothers suspected of a bloody attack on the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were killed on Friday when anti-...
The violent end to the
simultaneous stand-offs northeast of Paris and at a Jewish supermarket
in the capital followed a police operation of unprecedented scale as France tackled one of the worst threats to its internal security in decades.
With one of the gunmen
saying shortly before his death that he was funded by al Qaeda,
President Francois Hollande warned that the danger to France - home to
the European Union's biggest communities of both Muslims and Jews - was
not over yet.
"These madmen, fanatics,
have nothing to do with the Muslim religion," Hollande said in a
televised address. "France has not seen the end of the threats
Officials said Cherif
Kouachi and his brother, both in their thirties, died when security
forces raided a print shop in the small town of Dammartin-en-Goele,
northeast of Paris, where the chief suspects in Wednesday's attack had been holed up. The hostage they had taken was safe, an official said.
Automatic gunfire rang
out, followed by blasts and then silence as smoke could be seen
billowing from the roof of the print shop. Amid thick fog, a helicopter
landed on the building's roof, signaling the end of the assault. A
government source said the brothers had emerged from the building and
opened fire on police before they were killed.
Before his death, one of the Kouachi brothers told a television station he had received financing from an al Qaeda preacher in Yemen.
"I was sent, me, Cherif
Kouachi, by Al Qaeda of Yemen. I went over there and it was Anwar al
Awlaki who financed me," he told BFM-TV by telephone, according to a
recording aired by the channel after the siege was over.
Al Awlaki, an influential international recruiter for al Qaeda, was killed in September 2011 in a drone strike......culled from reuters.
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