Police search for two brothers in massive French manhunt amid fears of more attacks
Police search for two brothers in massive French manhunt amid fears of more attacks
(about 3 hours later)
PARIS — A massive manhunt for the perpetrators of France’s worst terrorist attack in generations shifted to the countryside north of Paris on Thursday as commandos and helicopter patrols poured into villages following reports that the two main suspects — both heavily armed — were spotted on the run.
PARIS — A frustrated manhunt for two heavily armed brothers suspected in France’s worst terrorist attack in generations shifted to the cottages and country lanes of rural France, even as fresh details emerged that one of the brothers had tried to meet with al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.
The investigation also broadened on another front, with police conducting arrests amid fears that more attacks could be planned.
U.S. officials said that the older of the two, Said Kouachi, 34, is believed to have traveled to Yemen in 2011 in an effort to link up with al-Qaeda’s affiliate there at a time when that group was eclipsing the terror network’s core leadership in Pakistan as the principal threat to the United States.
A day after the massacre of a dozen people at the offices of a satirical newspaper, France’s capital was a mix of mourning, anger and hair-trigger tensions — raised even further after the slaying of a policewoman in a Paris suburb Thursday morning.
U.S. officials said Kouachi may have received small-arms training and picked up other skills while in Yemen, but they described the years that followed that 2011 visit as a “kind of hole” in the timeline, with significant gaps in authorities’ understanding of the brothers’ activities and whereabouts. Those blank spots have led U.S. and other officials to seek to determine whether one or both brothers traveled to Syria or another conflict zone, or whether they managed to lower their profile in France to such a degree that scrutiny of them subsided.
Authorities said there was no immediate information to link the shooting with Wednesday’s attack at the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, whose well-known editor was among those slain in apparent retribution for the weekly’s provocative cartoons and content on Islam.
Now Said and his younger brother, Chérif Kouachi, 32, are France’s most-wanted men and are believed to be armed with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers — and on the loose somewhere in the French countryside. In a massive show of force on Thursday, armored vehicles rolled past the ancient stone fences and sugar-beet fields of Aisne, an agricultural district 44 miles north of the capital. Black-clad troopers wearing bulletproof Kevlar gear and carrying assault rifles cordoned off a large area of farmland as they went door-to-door, field-to-field, forest block-to-forest block.
But the latest killing underscored one of the main concerns among France’s shaken leaders: that the violence may not be over.
The two men, French authorities say, are homegrown Islamic extremists and the perpetrators of Wednesday’s bloody assault in a Paris newspaper office that left 12 dead and 11 wounded. Late Thursday, however, authorities were at least partially suspending search efforts in some areas as night fell and amid confusion over whether the suspects had ditched their gray Renault Clio after apparently robbing a gas station in the northern city of Villers-Cotterets earlier in the day.
France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said at least seven people have been arrested as the probes expanded. Cazeneuve gave no details on the detainees or any possible connection to the main suspects in Wednesday’s raid: the brothers Said and Chérif Kouachi, 34 and 32, the Paris-born sons of Algerian immigrants.
Despite the exasperating nature of the manhunt, French officials vowed to bring the men to justice and announced that they had taken nine people into custody in relation to the case. Authorities would not release their names, but French media said that those picked up in the dragnet included a sister of the men as well as her companion and the wife of Said Kouachi.
Chérif Kouachi, a former pizza deliveryman, has a history of funneling jihadist fighters to Iraq and a terrorism conviction from 2008, police said. His older brother had no major criminal record. He reportedly had lived in Reims, a city 90 miles northeast of Paris in France’s Champagne-Ardenne region.
Authorities gave no details on any possible connection to the main suspects in Wednesday’s raid: the Kouachi brothers, the Paris-born sons of Algerian immigrants.
As the hunt for the brothers intensified Thursday, investigators also sought to piece together their previous travels and any links to terrorist networks, notably to al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.
“We will show these terrorists through the firm defense of the values of the republic that we are not afraid and that we remain united,” said Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister.
In Washington, U.S. officials said there were indications that one of the brothers, Said Kouachi, traveled to Yemen in 2011 in an apparent effort to link up with the al-Qaeda affiliate there. French intelligence officials informed U.S. counterparts that the older brother made the trip to receive weapons training from the militant group.
Nevertheless, even as thousands poured into Paris’s Place de la Republique for a second night to honor the dead — including some of France’s best known cartoonists, who worked at a publication that had lampooned Islam along with other targets – this nation of 66 million remained on high alert.
Both brothers were on the U.S. no-fly list, officials said. The list contains the names of U.S. citizens and residents, as well as foreigners, who are not permitted to fly into or out of the United States because of specific security concerns. There are about 47,000 names on the list; the vast majority of those banned are foreigners.
Many spoke of unity, with the Eiffel Tower shrouded in black Thursday evening by the dousing its lights in honor of the fallen. The slogan “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie — became ubiquitous in offices, on sidewalks and in public squares nationwide.
A witness to Wednesday’s attack said the assailants shouted as they fled, “Tell the media that it’s al-Qaeda in Yemen,” the Associated Press reported. A French police official said the suspects had links to terrorists in Yemen, AP said.
And in a nation that is home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim population as well as the continent’s strongest movement of the anti-immigrant and extreme far right, there were also fears of rising religious and political tensions in the aftermath of the attack. On Thursday, a man was arrested in the city of Poitiers after painting the words “Death to Arabs” on the gates of a mosque. In the city of Caromb, a car belonging to a Muslim family was shot at. In two other French cities, small explosives went off near mosques.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), as the terrorist group’s Yemen-based affiliate is known, has previously targeted the United States, notably in 2009 when an attempt to bomb an airliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day was foiled because explosives hidden in an operative’s underwear failed to detonate.
No injuries were reported in any of the incidents, but they immediately ignited concerns about further ideological clashes, violent or otherwise.
President Obama consulted with his national security team to receive an update on the French investigation, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Thursday aboard Air Force One. He said that according to the Department of Homeland Security, there is “no indication of a specific threat” against the United States related to Wednesday’s attack in Paris.
“I’m afraid this is going to open a boulevard for the far right,” said Diane Tribout, 28, a public servant who joined a candlelight vigil in the Place de la Republique on Thursday, where crowds chanted, “Charlie isn’t dead!”
Nevertheless, Earnest said, “we want to make sure we’re doing every single thing that we can at U.S. facilities — military and diplomatic, around the globe — to protect Americans.”
“On the streets of Paris, you might not see it as obviously, but I know that in small towns and villages all across France, this tragic event is going to be used to fuel anger and rage,” Tribout said.
Upon his return to Washington from a trip to Phoenix, Obama headed straight to the French Embassy in Washington to sign a condolence book for the victims of the Paris attack. After writing a condolence message, Obama stood in silence for about a minute, then shook hands with French Ambassador Gérard Araud. Outside the embassy gates is a sign reading “Nous sommes Charlie” (We are Charlie), in solidarity with the massacre victims.
Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Front, which has surged in opinion polls here well before Wednesday’s attack, spoke out Thursday, calling her party the only one that had challenged the notion of “Islamic fundamentalism on our territory.”
French police said the Kouachi brothers were “armed and dangerous.”
She added her voice to those blasting the current and former governments of France for the security lapses that they say allowed the attacks to take place. Authorities knew both suspects, raising deep questions about why they fell so far off the radar of the French security services.
“We are confronting an exceptional risk that can lead at any moment to other instances of violence,” Cazeneuve said on Europe 1 radio.
Le Pen was additionally infuriated by the decision of those organizing a national vigil this Sunday to withhold an invitation to her party, which in opinion polls is now commanding the support of more than a quarter of the nation. Citing the omission, she insisted, “There is no longer any national unity.”
Strong and growing anti-immigrant movements across Europe appeared to be roused by Wednesday’s chilling attack, in which hooded gunmen speaking fluent French burst into the newspaper’s weekly staff meeting and sprayed the room with gunfire, leaving behind what one witness described as “absolute carnage.” The far right was using the attack as a rallying cry.
In Germany, organizers of a growing movement of anti-immigrant marchers that drew record numbers in the city of Dresden on Monday, called the attack a vindication of their efforts. In Britain, Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party, which also has been growing in strength, called the attacks the product of a secret “fifth column” of foreigners in Europe.
“We’ve got people living in these countries holding our passports that hate us,” he told Britain’s Channel 4 News.
But many in France insisted that the far right would not succeed in leveraging the attack for its own purposes, saying the nation was pulling together in tragedy, not being drawn apart.
“In the last 24 hours, what I have seen is a sense of national responsibility, a sense of unity,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a Paris-based terrorism and security expert. “We know they want to use this to tear us apart, to create division. But France will not allow that.”
Still, a day after the attack, France’s capital was a mix of mourning, anger and hair-trigger tensions — raised even further after the slaying of a policewoman in a Paris suburb Thursday morning. Authorities said there was no immediate link with Wednesday’s terrorist attack. But it underscored one of the main concerns among France’s shaken leaders: that the violence may not be over.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said “a main concern” was whether the brothers — or possibly others — could carry out another attack.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said “a main concern” was whether the brothers — or possibly others — could carry out another attack.
“There is no such thing as zero risk,” Valls told RTL radio.
“There is no such thing as zero risk,” Valls told RTL radio.
Paris prosecutors said they received an unexpected break in the case early: finding the national identity card of Said Kouachi in an abandoned getaway car, media reports said.
Virgile Demoustier in Paris and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.
Police, meanwhile, followed a tip that the brothers were on the move outside Paris.
French media reported that two men, believed by witnesses to be the suspects, were spotted at a gas station near Villers-Cotteret in the northern French Aisne region, about 45 miles northeast of Paris.
The manager of a gas station “recognized the two men suspected of having participated in the attack against Charlie Hebdo,” Agence France-Presse reported.
Other reports said the men — apparently armed with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers — fired shots and robbed a service station of food and gas.
And in another sign of the tools at play in modern dragnets: Twitter and other social media churned out tips and possible sightings of the Renault believed driven by suspects.
Counterterrorism squads, backed by helicopter patrols, fanned out around the area, a patchwork of farms, villages and woodlands. The search radius gradually tightened around Longpont, a medieval hamlet of about 300 people, and nearby areas.
Surveillance teams monitored main highways, including routes back to Paris.
A third suspect, Hamyd Mourad, 18, turned himself in at a police station in Charleville-Mézières, about 145 miles northeast of Paris. News reports said Mourad claimed to have a solid alibi — that we was in school at the time of the attack — but it was unclear whether authorities still believed he had a link to the bloodshed.
Mourad’s classmates launched a social media account to defend his claim of innocence.
In Paris, the bells at the Notre Dame Cathedral tolled at noon to mark a minute of silence during a national day of mourning called for the worst terrorist attack in modern French history.
Flags were at half-staff, and the lights of the Eiffel Tower went dark at 8 p.m. Paris time .
In a different show of resolve, Charlie Hebdo announced Thursday that it would publish next week as scheduled.
[What is Charlie Hebdo?]
“France has been struck directly in the heart of its capital, in a place where the spirit of liberty — and thus of resistance — breathed freely,” French President Francois Hollande said Thursday.
Wednesday’s attack unfolded with chilling precision as hooded gunmen speaking fluent French burst into the newspaper’s weekly staff meeting and sprayed the room with gunfire, leaving behind what one witness described as “absolute carnage.”
The death toll included 10 members of the staff, led by 47-year-old editor Stéphane Charbonnier, and two police officers.
After shooting dead their final victim, the killers calmly fled the scene, sparking a massive dragnet and raising France’s security alert to its highest level.
The mass killing added Paris to a list of European capitals, including London and Madrid, that have experienced major terrorist attacks since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
The assault came at a time of heightened anxiety across Europe about the threat of radical Islamist groups as thousands of young men and women from across the continent have poured into Syria to join the fight there. Many have come home radicalized by the experience.
It also touched one of the most sensitive fault lines in France: Those cherishing the country’s secular traditions and freedoms, and some members of Europe’s largest Muslim population who resist or resent Western-style openness. France’s Muslim population has swelled over the years with immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa and their descendants.
The younger Kouachi brother, Chérif, appeared to represent the trajectory of some French Muslims who perceived a life relegated to the margins. He increasingly fell under the influence of radical prayer groups and began watching videos of Islamist fighters in Iraq and elsewhere, his former lawyer said.
“He was part of a group of young people who were a little lost, confused, not really fanatics in the proper sense of the word,” Vincent Ollivier, his attorney in his previous terrorism case, told the newspaper Liberation. “He hadn’t really given any great thought to Islam and didn’t seem all that determined.”
In recent years, France has thrust itself to center stage in the war against Islamist extremism.
In 2013, French forces joined those loyal to Mali’s government to push back an onslaught by Islamist militants. France was also the first nation to join the U.S.-led effort against the Islamic State insurgency in Syria and Iraq, conducting bombing raids.
In just the past several weeks, France has been particularly on edge. Before Christmas, a man yelling “God is great” in Arabic was shot after stabbing three police officers in a suburb of Tours in central France.
Police are now watching for a possible backlash to the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Two explosions hit areas near mosques in France early Thursday — in Le Mans and near Lyon — but caused no injuries.
“What we must not do now is put Muslims and jihadis in the same bag,” Liliane Graine, a 58-year-old councilor in the southern Paris suburb of Montrouge, told the Associated Press.
[See: How cartoonists reacted to the Charlie Hebdo massacre.]
In Britain, authorities increased security at ports and border points. Other nations bordering France also stepped up monitoring of arriving travelers.
On Sunday, Attorney General Eric Holder plans to travel to Paris take part in an international forum on ways to combat violent extremism.
Murphy reported from Washington. Daniela Deane in London, Virgile Demoustier in Paris, Karla Adam in London, Souad Mekhennet in Frankfurt, Germany, and Adam Goldman, Greg Miller, Brian Murphy, William Branigin, Katie Zezima and Carol Morello in Washington contributed to this report.
