French authorities launched a massive dragnet this week following the massacre at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Here are the key moments so far. (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
DAMMARTIN-EN-GOELE, France —
The fast-moving events Friday also underscored the complex, even haphazard web of allegiances that constitute locally bred terrorism, with three men apparently working together yet claiming loyalties to two rival organizations based in the Middle East: al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and the Islamic State militant group that has seized parts of Iraq and Syria.
The dramatic police actions Friday began in the ancient town of Dammartin-en-Goele, where two brothers who touched off the crisis on Wednesday in a bloody rampage at the offices of a satirical newspaper were holed up in a printing plant. As night fell, they emerged from a crack in the door of the plant, guns blazing in an apparent death pact. Police responded with stun grenades before the men, still firing as they fell to the floor, were gunned down by police.
Twenty-six miles south, a third man, who claimed to be working in coordination with the brothers and suspected of gunning down a policewoman Thursday, brought terror to a corner of multicultural eastern Paris on Friday. He sprayed a kosher grocery with bullets, killing four people, before taking at least 15 hostages.
The man, Amedy Coulibaly, 32, a French citizen of Senegalese descent, later died in the police raid to free the hostages, an assault staged seconds after the showdown with the brothers, Said Kouachi, 34, and Chérif Kouachi, 32. A fourth suspect — Coulibaly’s wife — remained at large.
The crises deeply shocked the nation, exposed gaping holes in state security and heightened the ethnic, religious and political tensions that, particularly in recent years, have festered in the French republic. The brothers, in particular, where well known to French intelligence agencies, raising questions about how they could have fallen off the national radar so completely.
Tensions have already been mounting in France as an estimated 1,200 citizens have left their homes to join Islamist militants fighting in Syria in Iraq. President Francois Hollande, addressing the nation Friday, appealed to the nation not see the attacks as the product of Islam, but rather as the acts of “fanatics” who “have nothing do with the Muslim religion.” But he also seemed to be preparing the nation for a new era of uncertainty.
“France is not finished with this threat,” he said.
Late Friday, al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly attack on the Paris offices of the weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the Associated Press reported. That rampage left a dozen people dead, including the paper’s editor, several staffers and two police officers.
France’s ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, posted Twitter messages that all three “terrorists” had been killed and that the hostages were “safe.”
Police said a total of 16 hostages were freed: one at the printing facility outside Paris and the rest from the kosher store.
In an address to the nation, Hollande said four hostages were killed at the market.
According to France’s BFM TV, Coulibaly called the station hours before the police raid and said four hostages were dead inside the store. He said his action was “synchronized” with the Kouachi brothers.
As the hostage dramas unfolded, an apparent matrix took shape as police identified the gunman who seized the market as linked to the fatal shooting of a Paris policewoman on Thursday.
Earlier, investigators identified connections between the police slaying and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, whose provocative images and content on Islam had brought threats and reprisals over the years, including a firebombing in 2011.
In a statement in English provided to the AP in Cairo on Friday, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said, “The leadership of AQAP directed the operations, and they have chosen their target carefully.”
A member of the Yemen-based group who asked for anonymity told AP that the Charlie Hebdo attack was “revenge for the honor” of the prophet Muhammad. He said the organization did not claim responsibility earlier for “security reasons,” AP reported.
A senior security official in Yemen told The Washington Post on Friday that the older of the two brothers, Said Kouachi, visited the country in 2011 and linked up with AQAP. Kouachi may have met with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born recruiter and propagandist for the group, before Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in September 2011, the official said.
In his speech, Hollande praised security forces for the tandem operations and vowed to respond “with force” against terrorism.
“France is not finished with these threats,” he said.
In Dammartin-en-Goele, about 25 miles northeast of Paris, thousands of anti-terrorism forces had massed after days of intense searches in villages and woodlands outside the French capital, following sightings of the Kouachi brothers.
French authorities say the brothers exchanged fire with police before abandoning a stolen car and taking refuge inside the printing company, which apparently was selected at random. They took at least one hostage, but police gave no further details.
In scenes reminiscent of other recent terror-related standoffs — including last month’s hostage-taking at a Sydney cafe — French police put the area under lockdown orders, asking people to stay indoors and turn off their lights as the drama played out on an overcast and drizzly afternoon.
In separate developments, other links began to emerge.
First, police reported an apparent connection between the newspaper attack and the two suspects in the slaying of the policewoman in a southern Paris suburb.
Then on Friday, one of the police shooting suspects, Coulibaly, a French citizen of Senegalese origin, was identified by police as the hostage-taker at the kosher market in Porte de Vincennes on the eastern edge of Paris.
A police official at the scene told the AP that Coulibaly had threatened to kill the captives if police launched an assault against the brothers. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, described the twin events as “clearly linked.”
In 2013, Coulibaly was convicted of involvement in an attempt to help a militant Islamist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, escape from prison. Coulibaly was sentenced to five years but released early.
He previously served time in prison for crimes including armed robbery. Coulibaly later took a job at a Coca-Cola plant outside Paris and, in 2009, passed high-level security clearance for a meeting with then-President Nicolas Sarkozy to discuss youth employment programs.
Even as French officials weighed whether to lower the security threat levels around the country, they grappled with questions.
Coulibaly’s suspected accomplice in the police shooting — a woman identified as Hayet Boumeddiene — remained on the run. It was not immediately clear whether she took part in the market hostage-taking and managed to slipped away.
Intelligence experts also have begun to piece together apparent ties between the brothers and al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. In 2013, the Yemen-based group published a notice called “Wanted Dead or Alive for Crimes Against Islam” featuring the late Stephane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo.
France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said security forces “remain mobilized.”
Full details from the raid on the printing plant were not immediately know.
Yves Albarello, a lawmaker who said he was inside the police command post, told the station i-Tele that it appeared the brothers “want to die as martyrs.”
In an apparent brush with the fugitives, a businessman who had an appointment at the printing company said he shook hands with one of the armed suspects, believing he was a police special forces officer, France Info radio reported.
The man, identified only as Didier, said the owner of the business was accompanied by an armed man clad in black and wearing a bulletproof vest. Didier said he believed the man at first was a police commando.
“We all shook hands, and my client told me to leave,” Didier added.
The armed man then added: “Go, we don’t kill civilians,” Didier recalled.
“As I left, I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t normal,” Didier said in the radio interview. “I did not know what was going on. Was it a hostage taking or a burglary?”
Stunned onlookers watched as police columns sealed off the town’s industrial zone, dotted with warehouses and cement block apartment buildings.
“No one is safe,” said Kamel, a 46-year-old airport worker and nearby resident who declined to give his last name. ‘You don’t know what is going to happen next.’
Fresh details emerged Thursday that one of the brothers had tried to meet with al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.
U.S. officials said the older of the two, Said Kouachi, is believed to have traveled to Yemen in 2011 in an effort to link up with al-Qaeda’s affiliate there at a time when that group was eclipsing the terror network’s core leadership in Pakistan as the principal threat to the United States.
U.S. officials said Kouachi may have received small-arms training and picked up other skills while in Yemen, but they described the years that followed that 2011 visit as a “kind of hole” in the timeline, with significant gaps in authorities’ understanding of the brothers’ activities and whereabouts.
Those blank spots have led U.S. and other officials to seek to determine whether one or both brothers traveled to Syria or another conflict zone, or whether they managed to lower their profile in France to such a degree that scrutiny of them subsided.
In Yemen, a security official told the AP that Said Kouachi is suspected of having fought for al-Qaeda in the country. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of an ongoing investigation into the brothers.
As the manhunt widened in recent days, French officials announced that they had taken nine people into custody in relation to the case. Authorities would not release their names, but French media said that those picked up in the dragnet included a sister of the men as well as her companion and the wife of Said Kouachi.
“We will show these terrorists through the firm defense of the values of the republic that we are not afraid and that we remain united,” said Cazeneuve, the interior minister.
Thousands poured into Paris’s Place de la Republique on Thursday for a second night to honor the dead — who included some of France’s best-known cartoonists at a publication that had lampooned Islam along with other targets.
Many spoke of unity, with the Eiffel Tower shrouded in black Thursday evening, its lights doused in honor of the fallen. The slogan “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie — became ubiquitous in offices, on sidewalks and in public squares nationwide.
And in a nation that is home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim population as well as the continent’s strongest anti-immigrant and extreme far-right movements, there were also fears of rising religious and political tensions in the aftermath of the attack.
The attack on the offices of satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo is the deadliest in recent history. Here are some of the major terror attacks in France in the last two decades. (Davin Coburn and Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
On Thursday, a man was arrested in the city of Poitiers after painting the words “Death to Arabs” on the gates of a mosque. In the city of Caromb, a car belonging to a Muslim family was shot at. In two other French cities, small explosives went off near mosques.
No injuries were reported in any of the incidents, but they immediately ignited concerns about further ideological clashes, violent or otherwise.
Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Front, spoke out Thursday, calling her party the only one that had challenged the notion of “Islamic fundamentalism on our territory.”
But many in France said that the far right would not succeed in leveraging the attack for its own purposes, saying the nation was pulling together in tragedy, not being drawn apart.
“In the last 24 hours, what I have seen is a sense of national responsibility, a sense of unity,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a Paris-based terrorism and security expert. “We know they want to use this to tear us apart, to create division. But France will not allow that.”
Witte reported from Paris and Murphy from Washington. Michael Birnbaum in Paris, Daniela Deane in London and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.
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Anthony Faiola is The Post's Berlin bureau chief. Faiola joined the Post in 1994, since then reporting for the paper from six continents and serving as bureau chief in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, New York and London.
