DAMMARTIN – At least one hostage was seized in a town northeast of Paris on Friday during a huge manhunt for two brothers suspected of killing 12 people at a satirical weekly, according to a police source.
Five helicopters were seen flying over an industrial zone outside the town of Dammartin-en-Goele and the French Interior Minister confirmed an operation was taking place there.[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”10″]
A police source said the two suspects had been sighted in the town, where at least one person was taken hostage.[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”10″]
Before night fell on Thursday, officers had been focusing on their search some 40 km (25 miles) away on the woodland village of Corcy, not far from a service station where police sources said the brothers had been sighted in ski masks a day after the shootings at the newspaper.[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”10″]
The fugitive suspects were French-born sons of Algerian-born parents, both in their early 30s, and already under police surveillance.
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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”.
U.S. and European sources close to the investigation said on Thursday that one of the brothers, Said Kouachi, was in Yemen in 2011 for several months training with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the group’s most active affiliates.
A Yemeni official familiar with the matter said the Yemen government was aware of the possibility of a connection between Said Kouachi and AQAP, and was looking into any possible links.
U.S. government sources said Said Kouachi and his brother Cherif Kouachi were listed in two U.S. security databases, a highly classified database containing information on 1.2 million possible counter-terrorism suspects, called TIDE.
A source also said that the brothers had been listed in the databases for “years.”
Dave Joly, a spokesman for the Terrorist Screening Centre, said he could neither confirm nor deny if the Kouachis were listed in counter-terrorism databases.
While world leaders described Wednesday’s attack on the weekly newspaper Cahrlie Hebdo as an assault on democracy, al Qaeda’s North Africa branch praised the gunmen as “knight(s) of truth”.
Charlie Hebdo, where journalists were gunned down during an editorial meeting, had been firebombed in the past for printing cartoons that poked fun at militant Islam and some that mocked the Prophet Muhammad.
Two of those killed were police posted to protect the media house. (Reuters/NAN)
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