Scattered gunfire and revenge attacks shook France on Thursday as police launched one of the biggest hunts for the two heavily armed brothers suspected in the Charlie Hebdo massacre that killed 12 people on Wednesday, while one man sought in the deadly shooting turned himself in. The three are suspected to have links to al-Qaeda.
A man wearing a bullet-proof vest fired on police officers with an automatic rifle on Thursday just outside Paris, killing one and seriously injuring the other, police said.
Frightened yet defiant French citizens held a day of mourning for the dead — eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor — in the terror attack on the weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Muslims places of worship in two French towns were fired upon overnight, leaving no casualties, French prosecutors said on Thursday. Three blank grenades were thrown at a mosque shortly after midnight in the city of le Mans, west of Paris, and shots were fired in the direction of a Muslim prayer hall shortly after evening prayers in the Port-la-Nouvelle district near Narbonne in southern France.
An explosion at a kebab shop near a mosque in the eastern French town of Villefranche-sur-Saone on Thursday morning also left no casualties, reported AFP.
Messages of condolence, outrage and defiance over the Paris terrorist attack spread like wildfire around the world with thousands of people taking to the streets to protest the killings and using the slogan “Je Suis Charlie” on social media.
On Thursday, around one lakh people came out on roads in Paris to show solidarity and express condolence to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Many who poured into Place de la Republique in eastern Paris near the site of Wednesday’s noontime attack waved papers, pencils and pens. Journalists led the march but most in the crowd weren’t from the media world, expressing solidarity and support of freedom of speech.
Similar gatherings, including some silent vigils, took place at london’s Trafalgar Square, in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, in Madrid, Brussels, Nice and elsewhere.
Online, the declaration “Je Suis Charlie,” or “I Am Charlie,” replaced profile pictures on Facebook while Twitter users showed themselves with the slogan on signs with words of support for the 12 victims who were killed at Charlie Hebdo, a weekly newspaper that had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad.
Meanwhile, hunt is on for the other two terrorist brothers. A lover of rap music turned aspiring Muslim holy warrior and his older brother are suddenly the most wanted men in France, suspected of the armed onslaught on a newspaper office that claimed a dozen lives and horrified most of the world.
Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34, are the targets of a mammoth manhunt following Wednesday’s slayings at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The younger Kouachi, a former pizza deliveryman, had been sentenced to 18 months of prison in 2008 after trying to leave France to join Islamist fighters battling in Iraq. After he was released he worked in the fish market of a supermarket in the Paris suburbs for six months beginning in October 2009, but supervisors said he gave no cause for concern.
Two years after the conviction, police again detained him, but later released him without charge, in a probe of an alleged plot to free from prison a man who was convicted of bombing a Paris train line in 1995, a French judicial official said.
Associated Press reporters who covered the 2008 trial, which exposed a recruiting pipeline for Muslim holy war in a rough multiethnic and working-class neighborhood of northeastern Paris, recalled a skinny young defendant who appeared very nervous in court.
Cherif Kouachi’s lawyer said at the time his client had gotten in over his head with the wrong crowd.
During the trial, Kouachi was said to have undergone only minimal training for combat - going jogging in a Paris park to shape up and learning how a Kalashnikov automatic rifle works by studying a sketch. He was described at the time as a reluctant holy warrior, relieved to have been stopped by French counterespionage officials from taking a Syria-bound flight that was ultimately supposed to lead him into the battlefields of Iraq.
But imprisonment changed his former client, attorney Vincent Ollivier told le Parisien newspaper in a story published Thursday. Cherif Kouachi became closed-off and unresponsive and started growing a beard, the lawyer said, adding that he wondered whether time in prison may have turned his client into a ticking time bomb.
However, a French television documentary that portrayed Kouachi’s abortive attempt to fight in Iraq suggested his radicalization may have occurred well before he was locked up behind bars.