French Police Storm Hostage Sites, Killing Gunmen - Charlie Hebdo Suspects Dead in Raid; Hostage Taker in Paris Is Also Killed

Hostages were directed after police ended two sieges in Paris on Friday (Credit: Michel Euler/AP)

Story by New York Times
Written by Dan Bilefsky and Maia De La Baume

PARIS — The French police on Friday killed the two brothers suspected of massacring 12 people at a Paris newspaper on Wednesday and freed a hostage they had been holding unharmed, the authorities said. The police also killed another hostage-taker, described as an associate of the brothers, in a separate assault on a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Three hostages were killed and five injured at the market, although it was not immediately clear how many of those may have been shot in the final assault. Five hostages were reported to have been freed unharmed, a senior French police official said.


The assault against the two brothers, suspects in the attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, began shortly after 5 p.m. Explosions and gunfire were heard at a printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goële, outside of Paris, where the gunmen were holding a single hostage.

Rocco Contento, spokesman for the Unité S.G.P. police union in Paris, said the assault had unfolded rapidly and confirmed that the brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, were dead.

“The operation in Dammartin is finished,” Mr. Contento said. “The two suspects have been killed and the hostage has been freed. The special counterterrorism forces located where the terrorists are and broke down the door. They took them by surprise. It lasted a matter of minutes.”

Moments later, gunfire erupted at a kosher supermarket on the eastern end of Paris where the alleged associate of the Kouachi brothers, Amedy Coulibaly, was also holding hostages. One woman was seen running from the market as heavily armed police officers moved in.

The French police released an image of Hayat Boumeddiene, left, and Amedy Coulibaly, who are suspected being involved in the killing of a female police officer on Thursday. (Credit AFP/Getty Images)




Mr. Coulibaly, who police say gunned down a female police officer in Montrouge, a suburb south of Paris on Thursday, had threatened to kill his hostages if the Kouachi brothers were attacked.

The twin episodes threw the capital and its beleaguered government into a new crisis. President François Hollande interrupted a meeting with local officials to monitor efforts to capture the two suspects in the newspaper killings. When word of the second hostage-taking came, he sent his interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, to the scene, near Porte de Vincennes.

In a measure of the jitters pervading the city, the police ordered shopkeepers on Rue des Rosiers, a street with many Jewish-owned businesses, to close as a precaution.

Early on Friday, hundreds of French security forces converged on the printing plant, in an industrial park near Charles de Gaulle Airport. The suspects told negotiators they intended to “die as martyrs,” a police official said.

As that drama was playing out about 30 miles northeast of Paris, the police responded in force to the shooting and hostage-taking at the kosher market.

The police and news reports said that Mr. Coulibaly was believed to have joined the same jihadist group as the Kouachi brothers, and that a terrorism investigation had been opened. They issued a photograph of Mr. Coulibaly and appealed for witnesses to come forward. They also published a photograph of a woman, Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, who they said was also implicated in the Montrouge attack. They said both suspects were armed and dangerous.

Before the raid on the printing plant, Mohamed Douhane, a senior police officer who was following the negotiations with the Kouachis, said that the police were in contact with the two suspects and that they hoped to resolve the standoff peacefully.

“We have established communication with the Kouachi brothers,” he said. “They said they wanted to die as martyrs. They are behaving like two determined terrorists who are certainly physically exhausted, but who want to escape with one last big show of force and heroic resistance. They feel trapped and know that their last hours have come.”

The police said the brothers had been located at the printing warehouse by helicopters equipped with heat sensors. Shortly afterward, residents saw security forces drop down on ropes from helicopters hovering over the area.

Aircraft had been advised to avoid certain runways at the airport as a precaution. Residents of Dammartin-en-Goële were told to stay indoors. Students were locked down in their schools and were being kept away from windows and doors. Shortly after noon, the town announced that students at schools nearest the area of the operations were being evacuated by the police and taken to another school to be picked up by their parents. Helicopters were circling the town as a cold drizzle fell.

Mr. Hollande, after meeting with local officials at the Interior Ministry, said, “France is going through a trying time,” and called this week’s attack “the worst of the past 50 years.”

Looking tense but trying to sound resolute as the effort to capture the suspects was unfolding, the president said, “France is also shocked, considering that the perpetrators of these acts have not yet been arrested, and I am speaking before you as operations are ongoing.”

Saïd Kouachi, 34, traveled to Yemen in 2011 and received terrorist training from Al Qaeda’s affiliate there before returning to France, according to American officials. His younger brother Chérif, 32, who has worked as a pizza deliveryman and a fishmonger, had been detained and later arrested in 2008 for his involvement in a Paris terrorist cell that had been recruiting French citizens to fight in Iraq.