Four hostages die at Paris kosher supermarket

[caption id="attachment_63243" align="alignright" width="216"] Hayat Boumeddiene, is still on the run.[/caption]

TWO brothers suspected of a bloody attack on the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were killed when police stormed their hideout on Friday evening, while a second siege ended with the deaths of four hostages.

The violent end to the simultaneous stand-offs followed a police operation of unprecedented scale as France tackled one of the worst threats to its internal security in decades. The heavy loss of life over three consecutive days also risked fuelling anti-immigrant voices in the country and elsewhere in the West.

Officials said Cherif Kouachi and his brother Said, both in their thirties, died when anti-terrorist forces moved in on a print shop in the small town of Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris, where the chief suspects in Wednesday’s attack had been holed up. The hostage they had taken was safe, an official said.

Automatic gunfire rang out, followed by blasts and then silence as smoke could be seen billowing from the roof of the print shop. Amid thick fog, a helicopter landed on the building’s roof, signalling the end of the assault. A government source said the brothers had emerged from the building and opened fire on police before they were killed.

With hostage negotiators making contact with the terrorists by phone and police massing outside the building, a salesman who was inside the printworks when the terrorists arrived described inadvertently shaking hands with one of the gunmen, who pretended to be a policeman.

The man, called Didier, told France Inter radio: “When I arrived my client came out with an armed man who said he was from the police. My client told me to leave so I left.” Naming his client as “Michel”, he said: “I was in front of the door. I shook Michel’s hand and I shook the hand of one of the terrorists.”

The black-clad gunman, wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a Kalashnikov, told him: “Leave, we don’t kill civilians anyhow.”

Didier said: “That really struck me, so I decided to call the police. I guess it was one of the terrorists. It could have been a policeman if he hadn’t told me ‘we don’t kill civilians’. They were heavily armed like elite police.”

The gunmen are reported to have told police they want to die like martyrs.

Around 1000 children were evacuated from two primary and two secondary schools nearby. Some were heard shouting “Charlie! Charlie!”in reference to the cartoonists and journlaists from the magazine Charlie Hebdo who were murdered by the hooded gunmen three days ago.

Minutes later police broke the second siege at a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris. A police union source said four hostages had died there along with a gunman, believed to have had links to the same Islamist group as the Kouachi brothers, who was holding them.

Police later named the suspect in the Paris grocery shop siege as Amedy Coulibaly, 32, accompanied by his girlfriend Hayat Boumeddiene, 26., is with him and is also a suspect. Unconfirmed reports suggested two people had been killed in the hostage-taking at the grocery store. Coulibaly reportedly told hostage negotiators to free the Kouachi brothers from the other siege.

HOSTAGES RUSHED OUT

News footage of the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in the Vincennes district showed dozens of heavily armed police officers massed outside of two entrances. The assault began with gunfire and a loud explosion at the door, after which hostages were rushed out.

Reuters photographs taken from long distance showed a man holding an infant and looking distressed being herded into an ambulance by police. Others were carried in on stretchers.

French authorities have mobilised a force of nearly 90000 since Wednesday’s attack on Charlie Hebdo, a weekly that has long courted controversy by mocking Islam and other religions. The Kouachi brothers were prime suspects in this attack when hooded gunmen shot dead 12 people including some of France’s top satirical cartoonists along with two police officers.

Security sources said the French-born brothers of Algerian origin had been under surveillance and had been placed on European and US “no-fly” lists.

The violence raised questions about surveillance of radicals, far-right politics, religion and censorship in a land struggling to integrate part of its five million-strong Muslim community, the largest in the European Union. - Reuters

Hollande confirms four dead in kosher deli hostage-taking PARIS, Jan 9 (Reuters) — French President Francois Hollande confirmed reports on Friday that four hostages were killed at a siege of a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris.called for national unity and said the country should remain implacable in the face of racism and anti-Semitism.

“It is indeed an appalling anti-Semitic act that was committed,” he said of the hostage-taking by an Islamist gunman at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in the Vincennes district.

Some hostages were seen rushing from the market after heavily armed police broke the siege at the same time as they ended a separate stand-off in northern France involving the two Islamist suspects behind the killings at Charlie Hebdo magazine this week.

- Reuters, The Telegraph