French police swoop on villages after Paris attack suspects seen

Heavily armed anti-terrorism police swooped on woodland villages northeast of Paris on Thursday in a manhunt for two brothers suspected of being the Islamist gunmen who killed 12 people at a French satirical weekly.

About two dozen helmeted and masked officers carried out house-to-house searches in the village of Corcy, a few km (miles) from a service station where police sources said the brothers were sighted in ski masks. Helicopters flew overhead.

The two fugitive suspects 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. Officials said they were armed and dangerous.

In Paris, a policewoman was killed in a shootout with a gunman wearing a bulletproof vest. Police sources were unable to say whether that incident was linked to Wednesday’s assault at the Charlie Hebdo weekly newspaper, but the authorities opened another terrorism investigation.

Bewildered and tearful French people held a national day of mourning, and 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.

The newspaper had been firebombed and hacked 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. One witness described scenes of “carnage”.

World leaders described the attack as an assault on democracy. Al Qaeda’s Algeria branch praised it, citing a threat by the militant group’s founder against those who mock the Prophet Muhammad.

Many European newspapers either re-published Charlie Hebdo cartoons or lampooned the killers with images of their own.

Searches were taking place in Corcy and the nearby village of Longpont, set in thick forest and boggy marshland about 70 km north of Paris.

“We have not found them, there is no siege,” an interior ministry official in Paris said. “There were just some witness accounts, so we are checking.”

Meanwhile, Thursday’s shooting of the policewoman on the streets of Paris’s southern Montrouge district – whether related or not – set the country even further on edge.

Montrouge Mayor Jean-Loup Metton said the policewoman and a colleague were responding to a traffic accident when the shooting broke out. Witnesses said the assailant fled in a Renault Clio and police sources said he wore a bullet-proof vest and had a handgun and an assault rifle.

One police officer at the scene told Reuters he did not appear to resemble the Charlie Hebdo shooter suspects.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls was asked on RTL radio after an emergency cabinet meeting with President Francois Hollande whether he feared a further attack.

“That’s obviously our main concern, and that is why thousands of police and investigators have been mobilized to catch these individuals.”

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