Anxiety hung over France Thursday as police hunted for two suspects – believed to be Islamist militants – who shot up the offices of a satirical newspaper in the centre of Paris, killing 12 people in the deadliest attack on French soil since the end of the Second World War.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Thursday that "several" people had been interrogated and detained overnight in connection with the terrorist attack. In an interview on RTL radio, Mr. Valls said that the authorities' main concern was preventing another attack. He issued a plea for any witnesses to contact the police.
More Related to this Story
French newspaper Le Monde, citing judicial authorities, reported that seven people had been arrested overnight.
Mr. Valls declined to detail the state of the investigation. He said the priority was to hunt down and find the terrorists who had carried out the attack, and to prevent them from continuing to spread terror.
"We are facing an unprecedented terrorist threat, both internally and externally," he said, adding that, despite all the counterterrorism efforts underway, "there was not zero risk."
Earlier, an 18-year-old man handed himself voluntarily to police in northeastern France, an official at the Paris prosecutor's office said. Mourad Hamyd surrendered at a police station in Charleville-Mezieres, a small town in France's eastern Champagne region, the Paris prosecutor's spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre said. She did not offer details on Mr. Hamyd's relationship to the men, but said he turned himself in because he heard his name on the news in connection with the attack. A police source said one of them had been identified by his identity card, which had been left in the getaway car.
In the northeastern city of Reims, anti-terrorism police secured a building before a forensics team entered an apartment there.
French police released photos of two suspects, said to be armed and dangerous, and appealed to the public for information. They are brothers Said Kouachi, 34, and Cherif Kouachi, 32. Both are French nationals.
A police source said Cherif Kouachi had previously been tried on terrorism charges. He was arrested before leaving for Iraq to join Islamist militants and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008, according to French media.
The attackers fled the scene of the shocking attack on Wednesday at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper known for its provocative cartoons that make no allowances for religious or other sensitivities. Among the dead were five of France's best known caricaturists, including the newspaper's editor-in-chief, Stéphane Charbonnier. Witnesses said the gunmen had called for certain staff members by name before shooting them.
French President François Hollande called Wednesday's assault an act of "barbarism" that targeted all of France. He declared three days of national mourning and put Paris on its highest state of alert, tightening security at transportation hubs, religious sites, media offices and department stores as the search for the assailants got under way. Some 800 soldiers were deployed across the capital to bolster the city's police force.
Two gunmen – who wore masks and carried Kalashnikov assault rifles – gained entrance to the offices of Charlie Hebdo by forcing an employee to open the door for them at gunpoint. An accomplice waited outside at the wheel of a black Citroën sedan.
"They spoke perfect French. They said they were from al-Qaeda," cartoonist Corinne Rey, the woman forced to open the door, told the newspaper L'Humanité. The killings "lasted five minutes," she said.
Two policemen were also killed in the attack, including one officer who had been assigned to Mr. Charbonnier for protection after he received numerous death threats. Charlie Hebdo's headquarters were firebombed in 2011, a day after it published controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
The Libération newspaper quoted a police source who said the gunmen "clearly knew their target in advance." Once they gained entry to Charlie Hebdo's offices, the source was quoted as saying, "they went straight to the conference room. They looked round the room and said, 'Where's Charb? Where's Charb? [Mr. Charbonnier's pen name]' They killed him, and then they sprayed the rest of the room with gunfire."
Another policeman, already wounded, was shot in the head at point-blank range outside the newspaper's office after he tried to block the attackers' escape. After the final murder, one of the masked gunmen calmly paused and collected a running shoe that had fallen out of the getaway car. The Citroën was later found abandoned in northeast Paris, close to where the trio had carjacked another vehicle.
"What we saw was a massacre. Many of the victims had been executed, most of them with wounds to the head and chest," Patrick Hertgen, an emergencies services medic called out to treat the injured, said.
Ten other people were injured in the shooting spree, four of them critically. Witnesses said the gunmen shouted that they had "avenged the prophet" after shooting up the newspaper offices. Cries of "Allahu Akbar!" (Arabic for "God is great!") can be heard in videos that recorded the gunmen making their getaway.
Political and religious leaders around the world condemned the attack, with British Prime Minister David Cameron calling it "sickening," while German Chancellor Angela Merkel described it as "despicable." U.S. President Barack Obama offered American help in hunting the suspects, while Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said those behind the "heinous crime" had to be brought to justice.
The French Council of the Muslim Religion condemned the attack as "barbaric" and warned against "provocations" that would "only serve to throw oil on the fire." It said French Muslims needed to "exercise the utmost vigilance against possible manipulations from extremist groups."
The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders released a statement saying that "journalism as whole is in mourning" and calling on media outlets around the world to show their solidarity by printing Charlie Hebdo's controversial cartoons.
The last tweet from Charle Hebdo's Twitter account before the attack mocked Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared leader of Islamic State.
The French military has led actions against al-Qaeda-linked fighters based in North Africa, and the country is also part of the United States-led coalition carrying out air strikes against the Islamic State group that controls swaths of Syria and Iraq. The group has called for "lone wolf" retaliation attacks on French soil.
Amid concerns the attack would feed the anti-Muslim sentiment that is already on the rise in France and across Europe, Mr. Hollande used a televised speech to call for solidarity. "We must be aware that our best weapon is our unity. Nothing must divide, oppose or separate us," he said in televised remarks.
France last year reinforced its anti-terrorism laws and was on alert after calls from Islamist militants to attack its citizens and interests in reprisal for French military strikes on Islamist strongholds in the Middle East and Africa.
The last major attack in Paris was in the mid-1990s when the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) carried out a spate of attacks, including the bombing of a commuter train in 1995 which killed eight people and injured 150.
With a report from Reuters, The Associated Press and The New York Times
More Related to this Story
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
The Globe in Paris: Man linked to Paris attack voluntarily hands himself in to ... - The Globe and Mail
Dengan url
https://goartikelasik.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-globe-in-paris-man-linked-to-paris.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
The Globe in Paris: Man linked to Paris attack voluntarily hands himself in to ... - The Globe and Mail
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar