PARIS — Police stormed a kosher grocery store where a gunman who seized hostages Friday had threatened to kill them if police outside the French capital assaulted the hideout of the country's most-wanted terrorist suspects.
Nearly simultaneously, police launched an assault on the hideout outside Paris of two brothers accused of carrying out a massacre Wednesday at the offices of the weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
French news media and officials reported that the hostage-taker at the kosher store and the two brothers were killed in the assaults. Officials said hostages at both locations were freed, but there were reports of deaths among the hostages at the kosher store.
[Live blog: Latest updates on the shooting suspects and the hostage situation]
French President Francois Hollande told the nation in a televised address that four hostages were killed at the kosher store. He did not provide any further details.
French television showed hostages running out of the kosher supermarket in eastern Paris after police stormed inside. (Reuters)
Fifteen hostages were reported freed in the police assault on the store, and another one was rescued in the attack on the hideout of the two brothers.
The gunman who seized the kosher store, identified by police as Amedy Coulibaly, 32, a French citizen of Senegalese descent, threatened to kill hostages if police stormed a commercial building in Dammartin-en-Goele, about 25 miles northeast of Paris, where the armed brothers suspected in the newspaper massacre were holed up with at least one hostage .
Shortly afterward, police assaulted the hideout of brothers Said and Chérif Kouachi, 34 and 32, and loud explosions were heard from the scene of the grocery store seizure.
France’s ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, said on his Twitter account: “The kosher supermarket has been stormed. The terrorist is dead.”
Araud also reported that the two brothers were dead and their lone hostage alive after the police assault northeast of Paris.
Hollande congratulated French security forces and called for public “vigilance” to help combat domestic terrorism.
“France has not finished with this threat, and so I want to call on you for vigilance, unity and mobilization,” he said in his address to the nation.
Hollande described the hostage-taking at the kosher grocery store as an “anti-Semitic attack” and vowed that France would not be divided by racism or anti-Semitism. He denounced the attacker and the two brothers as “fanatics who have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.”
The raid on the store came right at sundown, starting with three loud explosions. A short pause was followed by 30 seconds of sustained explosions and gunfire. The operation came without apparent warning. Amid the blasts, police manning a cordon several blocks away ordered bystanders to move farther back from the site, and parents shepherded screaming children into the shelter of nearby doorways.
Moments before the raid, Anthony Ravaux, 29, spoke on the phone with one of the grocery store hostages, a friend who was hiding in the building’s cold storage unit along with several others, including at least one child.
“We’re very afraid, and we’re very cold. Tell the police to hurry,” the woman, whom Ravaux identified as Noemi, told him.
“Don’t panic,” he replied. “The police will do their best.”
Ravaux told her to conserve her phone’s battery, and the two hung up.
Within minutes, the streets echoed with gunfire.
More than an hour after the raid, Ravaux said he believed that his friend had survived, citing media reports that the hostages hiding in cold storage had all escaped. But he could not reach her by phone.
“I hope she’s with the police,” he said.
Police said Coulibaly had links to the Kouachi brothers. They also blamed Coulibaly for the murder Thursday of a French policewoman, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, 27, who was gunned down during an unrelated traffic stop on a Paris street.
Authorities released photos of the Coulibaly and an alleged female accomplice, but her whereabouts were not immediately clear.
Earlier, investigators identified connections between the slaying of the policewoman and Wednesday’s rampage a satirical newspaper in Paris that left a dozen people dead.
“I have learned with horror of a hostage-taking that has started at Porte de Vincennes and am going there immediately,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo wrote on Twitter.
Hayat Boumeddiene, a 26-year-old woman, and Coulibaly were “suspected to be armed and dangerous,” French police said before the raids on the two locations. They said the pair were being sought in connection with the Thursday killing of the female police officer in Paris. The police said they believe the killing was a “terrorist enterprise.”
Several ambulances raced toward the grocery store — called Hyper Cacher, or Hyper Kosher — where the hostage-taking took place hours before the Jewish Sabbath started on Friday night, a particularly busy time for a kosher shop.
A police official said several people were wounded when the gunman opened fire in the store Friday afternoon but were able to flee and get medical care, AP reported. It was not immediately clear whether other wounded people remained inside the store.
Police believe that Coulibaly was the sole hostage-taker at the kosher grocery store, said Christophe Tirante, a senior police official. Coulibaly demanded that the Kouachi brothers, the Paris-born sons of Algerian parents, be allowed to go free, Tirante said before the police assault on the store.
“Coulibaly has asked that they let the brothers go,” Tirante said. “The demand is to let them leave and I’ll let the hostages go.”
Tirante said that police believe that the attackers all know each other, possibly from time in prison in 2005.
“Kouachi and Coulibaly know each other,” Tirante said. Boumeddiene, who is also wanted in connection with Thursday’s killing of the policewoman, “has disappeared,” Tirante said, and Coulibaly was alone at the grocery store. French media identified Boumeddiene as Coulibaly’s wife or girlfriend.
At the kosher store, “there may be two deaths, it’s not clear,” Tirante said before the assault. The French Interior Ministry denied earlier Friday that anyone had been killed at the store during the hostage-taking.
Earlier Friday, riot police set up positions near the grocery in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Paris as helicopters flew overhead.
Outside the capital, thousands of police cornered the two suspects in Wednesday’s attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
Like the two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack, Coulibaly appears to have been well-known to French authorities for years before Thursday’s killing of the policewoman on a quiet Paris street.
Starting in 2001, Coulibaly was repeatedly held for crimes ranging from theft to drug trafficking, according to French media reports. In 2013, he was convicted of involvement in an attempt to help another militant Islamist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, escape from prison, Paris newspapers reported. Coulibaly was later released.
Coulibaly was born in 1982 in the Paris suburb of Juvisy-sur-Orge as the only son in a family of 10 children, according to police reports cited by French news media. He spent time in and out of prison starting in 2001, when he was convicted of robbery. French police believe he converted to radical Islam while in prison for armed robbery in 2005, the same time he met Cherif Kouachi in prison. The two men became devoted followers of Djamel Beghal, a French-Algerian man with ties to al-Qaeda who was convicted of plotting in 2001 to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris.
When Coulibaly was freed in 2006, he took up work at a Coca-Cola factory outside Paris. French security services apparently deemed him safe enough to meet France’s then-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2009, when Coulibaly was involved in an effort to promote youth employment.
“I’ll enjoy it,” Coulibaly told Le Parisien newspaper in July 2009, the day before he was scheduled to meet with Sarkozy. “In truth, in the cities, with youth, Sarkozy isn’t very popular,” he added. “But it’s nothing personal. In fact, that’s the case with the majority of politicians.”
Coulibaly was apparently still engaged in quiet militant activity. Just 10 months after his meeting with Sarkozy, police searched his apartment and found 240 rounds of 7.62mm rifle ammunition — often used in Kalashnikov assault rifles. He told police at the time that he planned to sell the ammunition on the street, not to use it to shoot anyone. Police also found photos of him visiting Beghal.
Before the police assault in Porte de Vincennes, Jewish and Muslim residents of the low-slung, middle-class neighborhood stood anxiously together behind police lines blocks from the grocery store, awaiting news.
Two women who worked at the store sobbed as they frantically dialed the numbers of friends. They had been off work when the gunman entered. One said she received a call from a colleague who could only get out the words “people are shooting” before the line was cut.
“It’s normal grocery store — everyone goes there,” said the woman, who declined to give her name.
“It’s a kosher store, but not only Jews go there. I go there,” said Malik Zadi, a 25-year-old Muslim of Algerian heritage. “In this neighborhood, there are Muslims, Jews, Christians. It’s like Paris. It’s a melting pot. Cohabitation.”
Sam Cohen, a 22-year-old Jewish resident who is also of Algerian heritage, said members of the community get along well together — regardless of faith.
But he said he worried that the attacks of the past three days have unleashed a wave of violence with no end.
“This is only the beginning for what’s awaiting France,” said Cohen, who wore a black hoodie and a black kippah. “Everyone’s going to grab a weapon, and there will be more and more dead every day.”
The attacker struck as residents did their regular Friday shopping ahead of sundown and the start of the Jewish sabbath.
The hostages were believed to be a combination of customers and store employees.
“They were only targeted because they were Jewish,” said one of the women who works at the shop. “They’re just normal people trying to do their jobs.”
As the siege extended late into the afternoon, an eery quiet descended on the normally bustling neighborhood, filled with cafés and grand old 19th century apartment buildings.
Parents shuttled kids home from school through streets swarming with helmeted police brandishing assault rifles. The subway station was shuttered, and all traffic was diverted far from the scene.
William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
Griff Witte is The Post’s London bureau chief. He previously served as the paper’s deputy foreign editor and as the bureau chief in Kabul, Islamabad and Jerusalem.
Michael Birnbaum is The Post’s Moscow bureau chief. He previously served as the Berlin correspondent and an education reporter.
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