France reels under tragedy

France has been on edge following Wednesday’s deadly assault by heavily armed gunmen on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, with more violence yesterday.
French special operations forces deployed yesterday in a northern town where the two suspected gunmen are believed to be located, a police source said.
RAID, the anti-terrorist unit of the French police force, and the GIGN, a paramilitary special operations unit, deployed in Villers-Cotterets in the northern Aisne region “where a car was abandoned after being used by the two suspects, who were identified by a witness”, the source said.
A total of seven people had been arrested since the attack, he said. Police sources said they were mostly acquaintances of the two main suspects. One source said one of the brothers had been identified by his identity card, left in the getaway car.
A shootout in southern Paris left a female police officer dead yesterday, triggering searches in the area as the hunt widened for two brothers suspected of killing 12 people at the magazine’s offices in an apparent Islamist militant strike.
Muslim places of worship in two French towns were fired upon overnight, leaving no casualties, prosecutors said yesterday.
In the Port-la-Nouvelle district near Narbonne in southern France, several shots were fired in the direction of a Muslim prayer hall shortly after evening prayers. Three blank grenades were thrown at a mosque shortly after midnight in the city of Le Mans, west of Paris. An explosion at a kebab shop near a mosque in the eastern French town of Villefranche-sur-Saone yesterday morning also left no casualties.
No link has yet been established between the attacks and the Charlie Hebdo killings which marked the worst attack on French soil for decades and which national leaders and allied states described as an assault on democracy. Montrouge mayor Pierre Brossollette said the police officer and a colleague went to the site to deal with a traffic accident. A car stopped and a man got out and shot at them before fleeing.
Witnesses said the shooter fled in a Renault Clio car. Police sources said he had been wearing a bullet-proof vest and had a handgun and assault rifle. However, one police officer at the scene said the man did not appear to fit the bill of the Charlie Hebdo shooters.
Live French television showed around a dozen police dressed in protective wear and helmets massed outside a building near the scene of the shoot-out.
The new incident came as France began a day of mourning for the journalists of Charlie Hebdo weekly and police officers shot dead on morning by black-hooded gunmen using Kalashnikov assault rifles. French tricolour flags flew at half-mast.
Charlie Hebdo is well known for lampooning Islam, other religions and political figures. Tens of thousands took part in vigils across France on Wednesday to defend freedom of speech, many wearing badges declaring “Je Suis Charlie” (I Am Charlie) in support of the newspaper and the principle of freedom of speech.
Newspapers across Europe yesterday either re-published its cartoons or mocked the killers with images of their own.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph depicted two masked gunmen outside the doors of Charlie Hebdo saying to each other: “Be careful, they might have pens.” Many German newspapers republished Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
Police released photos of the two French nationals still at large, calling them “armed and dangerous”. They are brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, aged 32 and 34, both of whom were already under watch by security services.
The attack has raised questions of security in countries throughout the Western world and beyond. Muslim community leaders have condemned the attack, but some have expressed fears of a rise in anti-islamic feeling in a country with a large Muslim population.
Security services have long feared that nationals drawn into Islamist militant groups fighting in Syria and Iraq could return to their home countries to launch attacks – though there is no suggestion that the two suspects named by police had actually fought in either of these countries.
Britain’s Cobra security committee met yesterday morning. London’s transport network was target of an attack in 2005, four years after 9/11.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said France faced a terrorist threat “without precedent” and confirmed the two brothers were known to security services. But he added it was too early to say whether authorities had underestimated the threat they posed.