Charlie Hebdo: The day Paris turned into a warzone (VIDEO) |
- Charlie Hebdo: The day Paris turned into a warzone (VIDEO)
- Charlie Hebdo: The militants who terrorised Paris for three days (VIDEO)
- Hostage taker asked friends ‘to attack police stations’
- Beware of global ‘terrorist actions and violence’, warns US
- #JeSuisCharlie hashtag used more than five million times, says Twitter France
- EPL: Alex Neil named Norwich new boss
| Charlie Hebdo: The day Paris turned into a warzone (VIDEO) Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:55 PM PST PARIS, Jan 10 — Pools of blood, shattered glass and bodies in the street — this was the day when the heart of France turned into a war zone. As commandos assaulted a Paris supermarket to free hostages yesterday, sending locals running in terror, more special forces stormed a building in a small town nearby, killing two Islamist hostage-takers. The kind of violence that seemed unimaginable in the City of Light concluded more than two days of terrible tension as police hunted the Islamist gunmen who had massacred 12 people at a satirical weekly magazine Wednesday. In eastern Paris, police stormed the Jewish grocery store where at least one gunman had earlier taken several people hostage. Explosions rocked the neighbourhood—one lighting up the shopfront in a fireball—and shooting erupted as the commandos burst in. "It's war!" screamed a mother as she dragged her daughter from the scene. In the aftermath, an AFP reporter saw a body sprawled by the cash till, surrounded by broken glass. Blood was everywhere. Another corpse was in a bodybag in the street, one of five people killed, including the gunman. Several others hostages fled from the firing into the arms of waiting police. But four people were critically injured. Ambulances raced to the scene, joining a jam of police vans and other emergency vehicles, all under the whirr of helicopters.
"There were police officers running in every direction," said Virginie Handani, 35, who lives two floors above the supermarket. Moments before, other special forces assaulted a printers' business in Dammartin-en-Goele outside the capital, where the two main suspects in the Charlie Hebdo massacre had holed up with one hostage. Explosions thundered and smoke poured from the roof of the building. The two brothers inside, who had led thousands of police on a wild manhunt for more than 48 hours, ran out in a desperate last stand and were gunned down. The hostage was saved. Final battle
The fiery denouement came at the end of a day when the abrupt arrival of huge numbers of elite police both in the capital and in Dammartin-en-Goele made the likelihood of a final battle appear inevitable. "It happened very, very quickly. We saw helicopters and suddenly we saw CRS (elite police) all around us. We started to panic a bit," said Stephane, 45, who works in a hazardous materials business in Dammartin-en-Goele, as he described his frightening morning. "They just gave us enough time to grab something warm to wear outside," he said. Police snipers set up on rooftops in the non-descript town and van after van of reinforcements deployed. Masked and helmeted troopers with automatic weapons could be seen peering out of a blue police helicopter hovering overhead. They didn't have long to wait before going into action. Meanwhile, at the Hotel Ruisseau in the French capital, opposite the Jewish supermarket, the shock and suddenness of events was just as intense. Guests were tucking into lunch when gunfire broke out across the street—the moment that a hostage-taker seized the store, spreading the country's terror nightmare back into the capital. "We heard shooting, it all happened very fast. Police deployed very quickly," hotel manager Pascal told AFP by telephone. The grocery store hostage-taker later told French BFMTV by telephone that he had coordinated his action with the brothers responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with security sources confirming he was also wanted for killing a policewoman just south of the city on Thursday. He said he was acting in concert with Said and Cherif Kouachi, who had themselves called reporters at the same TV station from the besieged printworks to claim responsibility for the killings in the name of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, who Cherif Kouachi said financed them. Police had fanned out across the neighbourhood on Paris' eastern edge and closed off streets, shutting down traffic on the city's vital ring road, which runs close by. "They ordered us to stay hidden inside and to close the curtains," Pascal said. There, also, the waiting did not last. In a flurry of fire and lead, the drama ended. In a telling final detail, revealed by BFMTV, the supermarket attacker did not hang up the phone properly, allowing the police to overhear him. And it was as he knelt to do his evening prayer that they stormed the building. — AFP  |
| Charlie Hebdo: The militants who terrorised Paris for three days (VIDEO) Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:48 PM PST PARIS, Jan 10 — The men who terrorised France for three days had ties to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, and were well-known to French intelligence services. Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi carried out the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine office Wednesday, killing 12, before fleeing the capital. They holed up with a hostage at a small printing firm Amedy Coulibaly killed a policewoman in Paris Thursday, a day before taking several people hostage at a kosher supermarket in the east of the city. Speaking from the store he told French television he "coordinated" his attacks with the Kouachi brothers. He, too, was killed when police launched an assault on the shop to end the siege, in which four hostages died. His wife Hayat Boumeddiene is still being sought by police. Cherif Kouachi
The 32-year-old Frenchman born in Paris to Algerian parents and orphaned at a young age grew up in the east of the city not far from the site of this week's magazine attack. His history with jihadist networks dates back over a decade to his days with the so-called Buttes Chaumont network, named after a park in the 19th arrondissement of Paris where its members lived. The group of young, radical Muslims helped arrange people's journeys to Iraq to join Al-Qaeda's fight US forces. The younger Kouachi was 22 when the network was broken up by French police. He was arrested just as he was about to fly to Syria in 2005, from where he was due to travel on to fight in Iraq. His lawyer at the time, Vincent Ollivier, said this week he was not particularly religious. "He was a fairly typical, he smoked, drank and chased girls," said Ollivier. At his trial in 2008, Kouachi said he was spurred to act by the abuse of detainees by US troops at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, but was relieved he did not have to go through with the trip. He told the court he was working In prison he met Amedy Coulibaly and the pair came under the spell of renowned jihadist Djamel Beghal, who served 10 years for trying to break an Algerian Islamist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, out of jail. Kouachi was investigated in the prison break-out attempt but the case was later dropped. Speaking by phone to French TV station BFM during the hostage crisis yesterday, Cherif Kouachi said he travelled to Yemen in 2011 for training—a trip financed Kouachi also knew Boubaker al-Hakim, a Franco-Tunisian fellow member of the Buttes Chaumount network, who later joined Islamic State and who claims to have killed two Tunisian politicians, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, in 2013. Said Kouachi
Cherif's 34-year-old brother was known by French intelligence to have travelled to Yemen in 2011, where he received weapons training from a local Al-Qaeda affiliate. Said first visited Yemen's capital Sanaa in 2009 and spent time at Al-Iman University, which was founded by fundamentalist cleric Abdel Majid al-Zindani. "He was disciplined, calm and discreet," said one former friend in Yemen. Another friend said Said had helped defend another school in northern Yemen against an attack by Shia militants in 2013. Both he and Cherif were on a US database of terror suspects and no-fly list. Amedy Coulibaly Couibaly was born in Essonne, south of Paris. He worked The 32-year-old petty criminal, who served time for robbery and drug-related charges, is believed to have converted to radical Islam in prison. He too was involved in the attempt to free Belkacem. He was sentenced to five years in prison in 2013 for his role in the attempted escape, after 240 rounds of Kalashnikov ammunition were found at his home, but he was a free man again by May 2014. It was while in prison that Coulibaly met Cherif Kouachi and Djamel Beghal. Like Cherif "he seemed to have a certain fascination for Djamel Beghal," prison documents said. Hayat Boumeddiene Boumeddiene, 26, married Coulibaly in a religious ceremony, but they have not had the civil wedding required to make it official in France. Her mugshot was released by police along with that of Coulibaly in connection with Thursday's shooting of the policewoman. Both were described as "armed and dangerous". She is still wanted by police. — AFP |
| Hostage taker asked friends ‘to attack police stations’ Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:47 PM PST
Amedy Coulibaly was killed in the climax of the siege, in which four hostages died. The 32-year-old Islamist told French television in an interview from the hostage scene he had "coordinated" his actions with the two gunmen who shot dead 12 people at Charlie Hebdo magazine on Wednesday. He "asked his friends to go and attack various targets, specifically police stations in the Paris suburbs," the source said. His 26-year-old girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, who is accused of being his accomplice in the killing Thursday of a policewoman south of Paris, is still being sought by police. The couple were married in a religious ceremony but were not wed under French law which requires a civil ceremony. Coulibaly also told BFM channel he was a member of the Islamic State jihadist group, which had called for attacks in France and other countries participating in US-led airstrikes against the militants in Iraq and Syria. He shot two people as soon as he entered the kosher store in Porte de Vincennes neighbourhood and had "one or more bags" of explosives with him but did not detonate them, a security source said. He had tried to boobytrap the entrance to the shop where he was besieged by police "but had not hooked up the explosives," the source added. — AFP |
| Beware of global ‘terrorist actions and violence’, warns US Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:44 PM PST
"Recent terrorist attacks, whether by those affiliated with terrorist entities, copycats, or individual perpetrators, serve as a reminder that US citizens need to maintain a high level of vigilance and take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness," the State Department said. — AFP |
| #JeSuisCharlie hashtag used more than five million times, says Twitter France Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:34 PM PST
The symbolic five-million mark, an unprecedented number in the history of France-related hashtags, was reached after elite forces killed the brothers suspected of the massacre and a jihadist ally in a dramatic finale to three blood-soaked days. The hashtag had been tweeted 5,044,740 times by 5:00 pm (2200 GMT) yesterday, with a peak of 6,300 tweets per minute. The number still trails far behind the more than 18,136,000 times #Ferguson was tweeted in the aftermath of a fatal shooting of a young black American by a white police officer in the Missouri town—the most tweeted hashtag of 2014. Yesterday the heavily-armed Charlie Hebdo massacre suspects were cornered in a tiny town northeast of Paris while an ally took terrified shoppers hostage in a Jewish supermarket, where four died and seven were hurt including three police officers. The Charlie Hebdo gunmen had kept France gripped with fear since they slaughtered 12 people Wednesday in the offices of the satirical magazine. — AFP |
| EPL: Alex Neil named Norwich new boss Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:31 PM PST
Neil was targeted as Neil Adams' successor at Carrow Road after helping Hamilton into the Scottish Premiership in his first full season in charge. The 33-year-old quit Hamilton, who are third in the Scottish top flight, take charge of a Norwich side who were only three points outside the Championship play-off spots when Adams resigned on Monday. "I'm absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to manage a club of the stature of Norwich—it's an exciting challenge at a huge club and one that I'm looking forward to," Neil told Norwich's website. "I've watched a lot of Premier League and Championship football over the years and I've always been really impressed with Carrow Road and the Norwich fans and the way they get the place going when they get behind the team. "It's a forward-thinking club with a fantastic infrastructure and big ambition, which matches my own ambitions. "Of course I'm sad to leave Hamilton, a brilliant club which has been such a huge part of my life for so long. But when an opportunity as exciting as this with a club like Norwich comes your way, you take it. "The aim now is simply to win as many games as possible and move Norwich City up the table." Neil will take charge of his first game today when Norwich travel to second tier leaders Bournemouth. — AFP |
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