Suspects in the terror attacks in Paris were killed in twin police raids today, ending three days of intense drama following the deadliest such assault in the country in half a century.
Seventeen people, including four hostages taken at a kosher grocery, were killed by the suspected Islamist terrorists in three discrete yet coordinated incidents in the French capital. With shots fired in quiet Parisian streets, car chases and hostage-taking, the city was gripped by tension.
The nearly simultaneous killings of brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, the suspects in the Jan. 7 attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine, and hostage-taker Amady Coulibaly bring relief to a country roiled by its worst terrorist attack since 1961.
“This is precisely what the intelligence services have been expecting and fearing in recent years, ” John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said on Bloomberg Television. “It’s striking that it has come to pass in a country that I think is probably better prepared to deal with this than just about any other European country.”
The assaults created an environment of fear and sparked debates in France and Europe on security, identity and cultural values. The country has Europe’s largest proportion of Muslims, and the anti-immigration National Front party has gained in recent opinion polls.
“We will come out of this stronger,” President Francois Hollande said in a televised address to the nation. “We are a free people that won’t give in to pressure, that isn’t afraid.”
Masked Men
The violence began this week when masked men armed with Kalashnikov rifles burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly, in central Paris. They killed 12 people before evading police to flee the city.
The following day, a policewoman was killed in Montrouge, a Paris suburb. Police identified the killer as Coulibaly, who the following day took hostages at the Hyper Cacher store near the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris, where Jews were shopping before the start of the Sabbath. Police are still looking for Coulibaly’s girlfriend, who they have said may be “armed and dangerous.”
“Until now we had only threats; now we’ve realized that these are real and present on our soil,” Jean-Louis Fiamenghi, a former head of France’s elite police assault force, said in an interview on i-Tele television.
At a press conference, Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins gave a detailed account of the events that led up to the killing of the three terrorists.
Charged Out
He said the Kouachi brothers emerged from a forest about 35 miles north of Paris yesterday and stole a Peugeot 206 at gunpoint. They soon ran into a police patrol in the industrial zone of Dammartin-en-Goele, just north of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport.
After an exchange of fire that lightly wounded Said, they entered a printing shop, where they took the manager hostage. He was released later in the morning. The brothers never found out that another employee was hiding in a second floor kitchen of the building and sending text messages to police.
Shortly after 5 p.m. the brothers charged out of the printing shop and tried to engage the special forces, who killed them with grenades and a 30-second burst of gunfire.
The police had earlier sealed off the town and encircled the building.
The Kouachis
The third terrorist, Coulibaly, had threatened to shoot his hostages should the police kill the Kouachis, so in Paris special forces instantly stormed the grocery. Besides Coulibaly, the police found four dead bodies.
They had been killed earlier in the day and not during the rescue, Molins said. Several other hostages were seen running from the store after the police assault.
Cherif Kouachi was known to police and intelligence services after spending time in prison for participating in a jihadist group. Molins said Cherif had visited Yemen.
While his brother Said didn’t have a criminal record, he may have attended a militant training camp in Yemen, police said. He was expelled from the Arab country in 2012 along with other Islamist fighters, a senior Yemeni intelligence official said, declining to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Cherif told BFM television that they’d carried out their attacks on behalf of Al Qaeda in Yemen. The brothers are French citizens of Algerian descent.
‘Clear Flaws’
Coulibaly had known Cherif Kouachi since at least 2010, police said. They joined a plot to help a prison escape and spent time together in jail. Coulibaly told BFM television, which contacted him in the store, that he had coordinated his attacks with the Kouachi brothers.
Molins said there had been hundreds of calls between the partners of Cherif and Coulibaly, showing their close ties.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on BFM television that the attacks showed “clear flaws” in France’s security and intelligence services.
Meanwhile, French politicians are stressing national unity in the wake of the attacks, with public “republican marches” scheduled across the country on Jan. 11.
French Muslim leaders have unanimously and harshly condemned the killers and told the country’s Muslims to turn out “massively” for Sunday’s rallies.
Prime Minister David Cameron of the U.K. and German Chancellor Angela Merkel both plan to attend the Paris march, as does Italian premier Matteo Renzi.
The attacks this week were collectively the deadliest terrorist strikes in France since the OAS group, which opposed France’s withdrawal from Algeria, killed 28 people in a 1961 train bombing.
To contact the reporters on this story: Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at rruitenberg@bloomberg.net; Matthew Campbell in Paris at mcampbell39@bloomberg.net; Helene Fouquet in Paris at hfouquet1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net Vidya Root, Heather Harris
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