The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, said on Thursday morning there had been “several arrests” overnight in the hunt for two suspects in the deadly shooting. No further details are yet available. In an interview with RTL radio on Thursday, 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.
Police have released the names of three suspects, including pictures of two brothers – one with possible links to al-Qaida – who are suspected of being behind the worst terrorist attack carried out in France for half a century. A vast manhunt is under way to find brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who were described as being in their early 30s and were considered to be armed and dangerous.
Pictures released by French police in Paris show Cherif Kouachi, 32, left, and his brother Said Kouachi, 34, right, suspected in connection with the shooting attack at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Police also named 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, who turned himself in at a police station in Charleville-Mézières, a small town in France’s eastern Champagne region, 230km north-east of Paris near the border with Belgium after learning his name was linked to the attacks in the news and social media, said Paris prosecutor’s spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre. She did not specify his relationship to the Kouachi brothers. Friends of the teenager were reported to have said he was in school at the time of the shootings.
A squad of French commandos was reported to have carried out a raid on an apartment in the city of Reims as part of the hunt for two gunmen and an accomplice – who were identified by officers – but it was later reported that the suspects were not in the property. French police continued to appeal for witnesses.
A police source told the Reuters news agency that one of the suspects had been identified by his identity card, which had been left in the getaway car. This is not confirmed.
Chérif Kouachi, who is now 32, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 after being convicted of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq’s insurgency. He said at the time he was outraged at the torture of Iraqi inmates at the US prison at Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad.
Witnesses described hearing the attackers shout “Allahu akbar” as well as “We have avenged the prophet.” Two witnesses said the suspects claimed to be from al-Qaida. One of them specified al-Qaida in Yemen, a group also known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.
Witnesses described the gunmen as seeming calm and professional. They held their weapons in a way which suggested they had some form of military training, although when they arrived at the building they were unsure where to go and what stairwell and floor the offices were on. They forced a female cartoonist to key in the entry code to the building and stormed into at least two other offices sharing the block, demanding to know the whereabouts of Charlie Hebdo. Once in the Charlie Hebdo newsroom they asked for staff members by name, starting with Charb, before opening fire.
The attackers escaped the magazine’s offices in a side street off the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir in a car and exchanged fire with police as they fled. They abandoned the car in the 19th arrondissement, near the Porte de Pantin metro station, where they hijacked another car, ordering the motorist out. They remain at large.
France has raised its terror alert system to the maximum and bolstered security with more than 800 extra soldiers to guard media offices, places of worship, transport and other sensitive areas.
A nationwide minute of silence was planned for noon on Thursday and the French president, François Hollande, declared a day of national mourning. Flags were to fly at half mast for three days.
The 12 victims of the attack have been identified. They are: Charb – whose real name was Stéphane Charbonnier, 47, artist and publisher of Charlie Hebdo; Cabu – whose real name was Jean Cabut, 76, Charlie Hebdo’s lead cartoonist, who was honoured with the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest civil decoration, in 2005; Georges Wolinski – Tunisian-born artist, 80, who had been drawing cartoons since the 1960s, and worked for Hara-Kiri, a satirical magazine considered a forerunner to Charlie Hebdo; Tignous – whose real name was Bernard Verlhac, 57, was a member of a group of artists called Cartoonists for Peace; Bernard Maris – known as “Uncle Bernard”, 68, was an economist and wrote a regular column for Charlie Hebdo; Philippe Honoré, AKA Honoré, 73, a cartoonist who had worked for Charlie Hebdo since 1992 and the artist who drew the last cartoon tweeted by the weekly only moments before the massacre; Michel Renaud – a former journalist and political staffer who founded a cultural festival who was visiting the Charlie Hebdo offices from Clermont-Ferrard; Mustapha Ourrad – a copy editor for Charlie Hebdo of Algerian descent; Elsa Cayat – Charlie Hebdo analyst and columnist; Frederic Boisseau – building maintenance worker; Franck Brinsolaro – 49-year-old police officer appointed to head security for Charb and father of a one-year-old girl; Ahmed Merabet – 42 and a French Muslim police officer and member of the 11th arrondissement brigade.
About 15,000 people take part in a vigil in Lyon, France to mourn the death of 12 people killed in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
About 15,000 people take part in a vigil in Lyon, France to mourn the death of 12 people killed in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Photograph: Inediz/Inediz/Demotix/Corbis
Large, spontaneous gatherings materialised in public squares across France on Wednesday evening to condemn the attacks and pay tribute to the victims.
Charlie Hebdo has been the subject of violent attacks in the past, following its publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Its offices were firebombed in 2011, and recent threats have also been made against it and other media groups. Riot police were deployed to its offices in 2012 after it published more Muhammad cartoons, including images of him naked.
Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief, Gérard Biard, escaped the attack because he was in London. He expressed his shock and said the magazine had had no specific threats of violence. “A newspaper is not a weapon of war,” he said.
