Charlie Hebdo attack: Youngest suspect arrested

Masked gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo killing 12 people, including the editor

Masked gunmen who stormed the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday target a policeman outside the office as they get away. The image of the policeman, on the ground, has been blurred.

The youngest of the three suspects in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine in Paris, has surrendered voluntarily, a media report said.

The 18-year-old suspect may have helped two other suspects to escape, Xinhua quoted police as saying. He surrendered “around 23.00 hours after seeing his name on social media”, media reports citing a police source said.

Another source also confirmed that “he was arrested and put in custody”.

Meanwhile, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls says there were “several arrests” overnight in the hunt for two suspects in the deadly shooting.

In an interview with RTL radio on Thursday, Mr. Valls said preventing another attack “is our main concern”, as he explained why authorities released photos of the two men along with a plea for witnesses to come forward.

French police officials had identified three men as suspects in the >attack on newspaper Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people and shook the nation.

Two officials named the suspects as Frenchmen Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, who are brothers and in their early 30s, as well as 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn’t immediately clear.

One of the officials said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network. A witness of the shootings at the offices of weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo said one of the attackers told onlookers, “You can tell the media that it’s al-Qaeda in Yemen.”

Masked gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which carried controversial cartoons, killing 12 people, including the editor, before escaping in a car.

> Read: ‘It was carnage, absolute butchery’

Cherif Kouachi was convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq’s insurgency and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

During Cherif Kouachi’s 2008 trial, he told the court, “I really believed in the idea” of fighting the US-led coalition in Iraq. He said he was motivated by his outrage at television images of torture of Iraqi inmates at the US prison at Abu Ghraib.

Shouting slogans as they fired, the men also spoke fluent, unaccented French in the military-style noon-time attack on Charlie Hebdo, located near Paris’ Bastille monument.

President Francois Hollande said it was a terrorist act “of exceptional barbarism,” adding that other attacks have been thwarted in France in recent weeks.