French police end twin standoffs, killing Charlie Hebdo terror suspects and an associate
French police end twin standoffs, killing Charlie Hebdo terror suspects and an associate
(about 10 hours later)
DAMMARTIN-EN-GOELE, France — Deploying stun grenades and assault rifles, French police staged nearly simultaneous operations to end two bloody standoffs Friday, capping three days of carnage that plunged France into a state of siege and heightened fears across Europe over the resurgent threat of homegrown terror.
DAMMARTIN-EN-GOELE, France — Deploying stun grenades and assault rifles, French police staged nearly simultaneous operations to end two bloody standoffs Friday, capping three days of carnage that plunged France into a state of siege and heightened fears across Europe over the resurgent threat of homegrown terror.
The fast-moving events Friday also underscored the complex, even haphazard web of allegiances that constitute locally bred terrorism, with three men apparently working together yet claiming loyalties to two rival organizations based in the Middle East: al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and the Islamic State militant group that has seized parts of Iraq and Syria.
The fast-moving events on Friday that left four hostages dead underscored the complex, even haphazard web of allegiances that constitute locally bred terrorism, with three men apparently working together yet claiming loyalties to two rival organizations based in the Middle East — al-Qaeda in Yemen and the Islamic State. In a bizarre twist, the assailants offered brief if telling interviews before going to their deaths, placidly discussing their motivations, funders and acts of violence.
The dramatic police actions Friday began in the ancient town of Dammartin-en-Goele, where two brothers who touched off the crisis on Wednesday in a bloody rampage at the offices of a satirical newspaper were holed up in a printing plant. As night fell, they emerged from a crack in the door of the plant, guns blazing in an apparent death pact. Police responded with stun grenades before the men, still firing as they fell to the floor, were gunned down by police.
The dramatic police actions Friday began in the ancient town of Dammartin-en-Goele, where the two brothers who touched off the crisis Wednesday in a bloody rampage on the offices of a satirical newspaper were holed up in a printing plant. As night fell, they emerged from a crack in the door of the plant, guns blazing in an apparent death pact. Police responded with stun grenades, before they took the men down, still firing as they fell to the ground.
Twenty-six miles south, a third man, who claimed to be working in coordination with the brothers and suspected of gunning down a policewoman Thursday, brought terror to a corner of multicultural eastern Paris on Friday. He sprayed a kosher grocery with bullets, killing four people, before taking at least 15 hostages.
Twenty-six miles south, a third man, who claimed to be working in coordination with the brothers and was suspected of gunning down a police officer on Thursday, brought terror to a corner of multicultural east Paris on Friday. He sprayed a kosher grocery with bullets, killing four, before taking 16 hostages. The man, Amedy Coulibaly, 32, a French citizen of Senegalese descent, later died in the police raid to free the hostages, staged only minutes after the confrontation ended with the brothers, Said Kouachi, 34, and Chérif Kouachi, 32. A fourth suspect — Coulibaly’s female companion — remained at large.
The man, Amedy Coulibaly, 32, a French citizen of Senegalese descent, later died in the police raid to free the hostages, an assault staged seconds after the showdown with the brothers, Said Kouachi, 34, and Chérif Kouachi, 32. A fourth suspect — Coulibaly’s wife — remained at large.
The crises deeply shocked the nation, exposed gaping holes in state security and heightened the ethnic, religious and political tensions that, particularly in recent years, have festered in the French republic. The brothers, in particular, were well known to French intelligence agencies, raising serious questions about how they could have fallen off the national radar so completely.
The crises deeply shocked the nation, exposed gaping holes in state security and heightened the ethnic, religious and political tensions that, particularly in recent years, have festered in the French republic. The brothers, in particular, where well known to French intelligence agencies, raising questions about how they could have fallen off the national radar so completely.
“There was a failing, of course,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on BFM television late Friday. “When 17 people are killed, this means there was a failing,” he added, citing the three-day death toll.
Tensions have already been mounting in France as an estimated 1,200 citizens have left their homes to join Islamist militants fighting in Syria in Iraq. President Francois Hollande, addressing the nation Friday, appealed to the nation not see the attacks as the product of Islam, but rather as the acts of “fanatics” who “have nothing do with the Muslim religion.” But he also seemed to be preparing the nation for a new era of uncertainty.
Speaking during an event in Tennessee on Friday, President Obama offered his condolences to the French people following this week’s terror attacks in and around Paris.
“France is not finished with this threat,” he said.
“We grieve with you, we fight alongside you to uphold our values, the values that we share, the universal values that bind us together as friends and as allies,” Obama said.
Late Friday, al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly attack on the Paris offices of the weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the Associated Press reported. That rampage left a dozen people dead, including the paper’s editor, several staffers and two police officers.
Obama said that after Friday’s raids he was hopeful that the “immediate threat” had been resolved. He said after Wednesday’s attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that he directed U.S. law enforcement and counterintelligence officials to assist the French government.
France’s ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, posted Twitter messages that all three “terrorists” had been killed and that the hostages were “safe.”
“I think it’s important for us to understand, France is our oldest ally,” Obama said. “We want the people of France to know the United States stands with you today, stands with you tomorrow. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families that have been affected. . . .
Police said a total of 16 hostages were freed: one at the printing facility outside Paris and the rest from the kosher store.
“The streets of Paris and the world see again what the terrorist stands for: suffering,” Obama continued. “We stand for freedom and hope and dignity for all human beings. That spirit will endure forever, long after the scourge of terrorism is banished from this world.”
In an address to the nation, Hollande said four hostages were killed at the market.
The barrage of violence sparked an outpouring of emotion across Europe, even as it raised fears of emboldening anti-immigrant, far-right movements that have made powerful and recent gains. The leaders of Germany, Britain, France and Italy announced plans to convene in Paris on Sunday, partaking in a vigil meant to celebrate French unity and the lives of the fallen, and especially the irreverent cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo.
According to France’s BFM TV, Coulibaly called the station hours before the police raid and said four hostages were dead inside the store. He said his action was “synchronized” with the Kouachi brothers.
Tensions have already been mounting in France as an estimated 1,200 of its citizens have left their homes to join Islamist militants fighting in Syria and in Iraq. At the same time, France has emerged as a leader in the effort to counter the rise of Islamist militants, sending troops to Africa and joining the United States in bombing runs against the Islamic State group in Iraq.
[Live blog: Latest updates on the shooting suspects and the ongoing hostage situation]
The terror dredged up long-known stresses in French society, including the lingering problems of disadvantaged young Muslims living in hives of apartments in the poor Paris suburbs. Yet President François Hollande, addressing the nation Friday, appealed to his citizens that they not see the violence this week as the product of Islam, but rather as the acts of “fanatics” that “have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.”
As the hostage dramas unfolded, an apparent matrix took shape as police identified the gunman who seized the market as linked to the fatal shooting of a Paris policewoman on Thursday.
He also seemed to prepare the nation for a new era of uncertainty. “France is not finished with this threat,” he said.
Earlier, investigators identified connections between the police slaying and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, whose provocative images and content on Islam had brought threats and reprisals over the years, including a firebombing in 2011.
The day’s violence started around 8:30 a.m. when shots were reported near Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport. The prosecutor in charge of the investigation, François Molins, said the stolen gray Renault Clio the Kouachi brothers had been driving got stuck in a ditch, forcing them to carjack a Peugeot 206, in which they stumbled upon a police patrol. Officers engaged the men in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele, and Said Kouachi was grazed in the neck. On foot, the brothers — two French-born orphans of Algerian descent, one an occasional pizza deliveryman, the other a long pious zealot — sought refuge in the CTD Printing Plant, situated in an industrial enclave.
In a statement in English provided to the AP in Cairo on Friday, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said, “The leadership of AQAP directed the operations, and they have chosen their target carefully.”
The men initially took one hostage before letting him go, claiming they were not interested in killing “civilians.” During the eight-hour standoff, one employee hid under a sink in the plant’s kitchen, going undetected by the brothers and offering police details on their whereabouts via cellphone.
A member of the Yemen-based group who asked for anonymity told AP that the Charlie Hebdo attack was “revenge for the honor” of the prophet Muhammad. He said the organization did not claim responsibility earlier for “security reasons,” AP reported.
SWAT teams attempted negotiations by leaving voice mails on their cell numbers, to which the men never replied. At 4:56 p.m., the brothers emerged, making their last stand.
A senior security official in Yemen told The Washington Post on Friday that the older of the two brothers, Said Kouachi, visited the country in 2011 and linked up with AQAP. Kouachi may have met with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born recruiter and propagandist for the group, before Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in September 2011, the official said.
In Paris, meanwhile, a separate but linked hostage situation began unfolding around 1 p.m. The target: a kosher grocery store in eastern Paris, bustling in the hours ahead of the start of the Jewish Sabbath. Amedy Coulibaly, an associate the Kouachi brothers had met in prison, entered the store and started shooting an assault rifle, killing four people before quickly taking hostages. Police officials said that his demand was simple: If police stormed the Kouachi brothers, he would kill his captives.
In his speech, Hollande praised security forces for the tandem operations and vowed to respond “with force” against terrorism.
Shortly after 5 p.m., police raided the grocery. Six quick explosions could be heard along with the sound of gunfire. Coulibaly was dead; the hostages secured. After authorities entered the grocery, they found Coulibaly had rigged the place with explosives.
“France is not finished with these threats,” he said.
Before they were killed, the three men said Friday that they had ties to Islamist militants in the Middle East. Authorities drew multiple connections between the men. French security authorities said that the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly had all been part of the Buttes Chaumont network, named after the Paris park where the group did its exercises. Cellphone records showed their wives had been in regular contact.
In Dammartin-en-Goele, about 25 miles northeast of Paris, thousands of anti-terrorism forces had massed after days of intense searches in villages and woodlands outside the French capital, following sightings of the Kouachi brothers.
Chérif Kouachi told BFM TV on Friday morning that he and his brother had been sent by al-Qaeda’s Arabian Peninsula affiliate and that he had met the group’s leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen before Awlaki’s 2011 death. He directly stated that the leader had helped finance the brothers, who were heavily armed with assault rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
French authorities say the brothers exchanged fire with police before abandoning a stolen car and taking refuge inside the printing company, which apparently was selected at random. They took at least one hostage, but police gave no further details.
U.S. authorities said Thursday that Said Kouachi had visited Yemen. BFM TV said that it had reached Kouachi at the printing plant Friday morning when it called the building’s phone number hoping to find a witness to the attack. Chérif Kouachi simply picked up the phone. On Friday, a member of al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen asserted responsibility for Wednesday’s attack against Charlie Hebdo that launched the crisis, calling it “revenge” for the paper’s satirical images lampooning Islam and the prophet Muhammad, according to the Associated Press.
In scenes reminiscent of other recent terror-related standoffs — including last month’s hostage-taking at a Sydney cafe — French police put the area under lockdown orders, asking people to stay indoors and turn off their lights as the drama played out on an overcast and drizzly afternoon.
The French newspaper Le Monde on Friday released what it said were Coulibaly’s personal photos showing him on an apparent trip to central France. The newspaper said he was visiting Djamel Beghal, a militant Islamist who spent time in prison connected to an attempt to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris and was later freed.
[Read: Shooting suspects tried to meet with al-Qaeda]
A woman wearing a full-face veil known as a niqab, whom Le Monde identified as Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s companion, was also visible in the photos. Both the woman and Coulibaly were shooting crossbows. French authorities said Friday that Beghal, who had ties to al-Qaeda, had been a mentor to Coulibaly. Beghal was also friendly with Chérif Kouachi. Authorities said both Kouachi and Coulibaly had been recruited while in prison with Beghal in 2005.
In separate developments, other links began to emerge.
On Friday afternoon, Coulibaly also spoke to BFM TV, calling the station in an apparent effort to reach police. In that conversation, Coulibaly, who is said to have killed a police officer on Thursday, sounded almost casual. He had closely coordinated the attacks with the Kouachi brothers. But he also said that he had been sent by “Daesh,” another name for the Islamic State, which has clashed with al-Qaeda. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear, and by day’s end, all three suspects were dead.
First, police reported an apparent connection between the newspaper attack and the two suspects in the slaying of the policewoman in a southern Paris suburb.
“We coordinated from the beginning,” Coulibaly said.
Then on Friday, one of the police shooting suspects, Coulibaly, a French citizen of Senegalese origin, was identified by police as the hostage-taker at the kosher market in Porte de Vincennes on the eastern edge of Paris.
Birnbaum reported from Paris. Virgile Demoustier in Paris contributed to this report.
A police official at the scene told the AP that Coulibaly had threatened to kill the captives if police launched an assault against the brothers. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, described the twin events as “clearly linked.”
In 2013, Coulibaly was convicted of involvement in an attempt to help a militant Islamist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, escape from prison. Coulibaly was sentenced to five years but released early.
He previously served time in prison for crimes including armed robbery. Coulibaly later took a job at a Coca-Cola plant outside Paris and, in 2009, passed high-level security clearance for a meeting with then-President Nicolas Sarkozy to discuss youth employment programs.
Even as French officials weighed whether to lower the security threat levels around the country, they grappled with questions.
Coulibaly’s suspected accomplice in the police shooting — a woman identified as Hayet Boumeddiene — remained on the run. It was not immediately clear whether she took part in the market hostage-taking and managed to slipped away.
Intelligence experts also have begun to piece together apparent ties between the brothers and al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. In 2013, the Yemen-based group published a notice called “Wanted Dead or Alive for Crimes Against Islam” featuring the late Stephane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo.
France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said security forces “remain mobilized.”
Full details from the raid on the printing plant were not immediately know.
Yves Albarello, a lawmaker who said he was inside the police command post, told the station i-Tele that it appeared the brothers “want to die as martyrs.”
In an apparent brush with the fugitives, a businessman who had an appointment at the printing company said he shook hands with one of the armed suspects, believing he was a police special forces officer, France Info radio reported.
The man, identified only as Didier, said the owner of the business was accompanied by an armed man clad in black and wearing a bulletproof vest. Didier said he believed the man at first was a police commando.
“We all shook hands, and my client told me to leave,” Didier added.
The armed man then added: “Go, we don’t kill civilians,” Didier recalled.
“As I left, I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t normal,” Didier said in the radio interview. “I did not know what was going on. Was it a hostage taking or a burglary?”
Stunned onlookers watched as police columns sealed off the town’s industrial zone, dotted with warehouses and cement block apartment buildings.
“No one is safe,” said Kamel, a 46-year-old airport worker and nearby resident who declined to give his last name. ‘You don’t know what is going to happen next.’
Fresh details emerged Thursday that one of the brothers had tried to meet with al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.
U.S. officials said the older of the two, Said Kouachi, 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.
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.
In Yemen, a security official told the AP that Said Kouachi is suspected of having fought for al-Qaeda in the country. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of an ongoing investigation into the brothers.
As the manhunt widened in recent days, French officials 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.
“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 Cazeneuve, the interior minister.
Thousands poured into Paris’s Place de la Republique on Thursday for a second night to honor the dead — who included some of France’s best-known cartoonists at a publication that had lampooned Islam along with other targets.
Many spoke of unity, with the Eiffel Tower shrouded in black Thursday evening, its lights doused in honor of the fallen. The slogan “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie — became ubiquitous in offices, on sidewalks and in public squares nationwide.
And in a nation that is home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim population as well as the continent’s strongest anti-immigrant and extreme far-right movements, 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.
No injuries were reported in any of the incidents, but they immediately ignited concerns about further ideological clashes, violent or otherwise.
Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Front, spoke out Thursday, calling her party the only one that had challenged the notion of “Islamic fundamentalism on our territory.”
But many in France said 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.”
Witte reported from Paris and Murphy from Washington. Michael Birnbaum in Paris, Daniela Deane in London and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.
Our full coverage of France shooting:
Our full coverage of France shooting:
- Live blog: Latest updates from two standoffs
-After Paris attacks, questions about intelligence failures
-In a kosher grocery store in Paris, terror takes a deadly toll
-Attack suspect was known to French authorities
- Official: Suspect thought to have met with Anwar al-Awlaki
-Live blog: Latest updates from two standoffs
- Hostake taking said to be linked to shooting of a policewoman
- Hostake taking said to be linked to shooting of a policewoman
