French anti-terrorism police converged on an area northeast of Paris on Thursday after two brothers suspected of being behind an attack on a satirical newspaper were spotted at a petrol station in the region.
France’s Prime Minister said on Thursday that he feared the Islamist militants who killed 12 people could strike again as a manhunt for the two men widened across the country.
The police released photographs of the two French nationals still at large, calling them “armed and dangerous”: brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, aged 32 and 34, both of whom were already under watch by security services.
As police chased the gunmen, several incidents rocked the jittery nation, although it was not clear whether they were linked to Wednesday’s attack.
Just south of Paris, a man shot dead a policewoman and wounded a city employee with an automatic rifle — an act that prosecutors said they were treating as terrorism. Montrouge Mayor Jean-Loup Metton said the policewoman and a colleague were attending a reported traffic accident when Thursday’s shooting occurred. Witnesses said the assailant fled in a Renault Clio car, and police sources said he wore a bullet-proof vest and had a handgun and assault rifle.
There was an explosion at a kebab shop in eastern France, with no casualties immediately reported. And two Muslim places of worship were also fired at in the wake of Wednesday’s attacks, prosecutors said.
Two police sources said the brothers were seen armed and wearing cagoules in a Renault Clio car at a petrol station on a secondary road in Villers-Cotterets, some 70 kilometres from the French capital.
Late Wednesday, an 18-year-old man turned himself into police in Charleville-Mezieres near the Belgian border. A legal source said he was the brother-in-law of one of the main suspects and French media quoted friends as saying he was in school at the moment of the attack.
A total of seven people had been arrested since the attack.
