France manhunt Live: Police conduct house-to-house searches in wooded areas northeast of Paris

Last Updated: Friday, January 9, 2015 - 09:20

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Zee Media Bureau
Paris: Manhunt continues in France on Friday for two brothers who are suspected to be the Islamist gunmen who killed 12 people at French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

Here are the live updates:

• Armed and masked anti-terrorism police are focussing on woodland villages northeast of Paris while looking for Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, the two brothers suspected to be behind the Wednesday attack at Charlie Hebdo.

On Thursday, police officers conducted house-to-house searches in the village of Corcy, a few kilometres from a service station where police sources said the brothers were sighted in ski masks. Helicopters also scouted the area.
Searches were also taking place in the nearby village of Longpont, set in thick forest and boggy marshland about 70 kilometres 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.
In Longpont, a resident said police had told villagers to stay indoors because the gunmen may have abandoned their car there.

• Said and Cherif Kouach 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".

United States and European sources close to the investigation said on Thursday that one of the brothers, Said Kouachi, was in Yemen in 2011 for a number of months training with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the group`s most active affiliates.
US government sources said Said Kouachi and his brother Cherif Kouachi were listed in two US security databases, a highly classified database containing information on 1.2 million possible counter-terrorism suspects, called TIDE, and the much smaller "no fly" list maintained by the Terrorist Screening Centre, an inter-agency unit.

• Also on Thursday, US President Barack Obama made an unannounced visit to the French Embassy in Washington to pay his respects. He wrote in a condolence book, "As allies across the centuries, we stand united with our French brothers to ensure that justice is done and our way of life is defended. We go forward together knowing that terror is no match for freedom and ideals we stand for - ideals that light the world."
• Also yesterday, a policewoman was killed in Paris 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.

Montrouge Mayor Jean-Loup Metton said the policewoman and a colleague came under fire while responding to a reported traffic accident. Witnesses said the assailant fled in a Renault Clio. Police sources said he wore a bullet-proof vest and had a an assault rifle and a handgun. A police officer at the scene told Reuters he did not appear to resemble the Charlie Hebdo shooter suspects.

• Bewildered and tearful French people held a national day of mourning yesterday. 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.
• Police have already released photographs of the two suspects, Cherif and Said Kouachi, 32 and 34.

A third person wanted by police, an 18-year-old man, turned himself into police in Charleville-Mézières near the Belgian border late on Wednesday. A legal source said he was the brother-in-law of one of the brothers. French media quoted friends as saying he was in school at the time of the attack.