Police seal off Paris in huge manhunt after 12 killed in Charlie Hebdo attack

François Hollande declares day of national mourning after ‘assault on democracy’ after three men storm satirical magazine 

French police have been conducting a concerted manhunt for the perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack in France for half a century and the bloodiest single assault on western journalism in living memory.

The attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which left 12 dead, triggered a wave of solidarity, with rallies in defence of free speech in more than 30 French cities and in global capitals. President François Hollande declared a day of national mourning on Thursday with flags at half-mast for three days, saying the country had been “struck at its very heart”. But he vowed: “Freedom will always be stronger than barbarism.”

orld leaders also pledged they would not be cowed, but the longer-term impact on free expression was unclear in the wake of a mass killing of such brutality.

Two gunmen in balaclavas and bullet-proof vests, armed with a pump-action shotgun and an automatic rifle, stormed into the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo at about 11.30am as about 15 journalists had gathered for the weekly editorial conference. They called for the editor by name and then murdered him before spraying the room with gunfire, killing nine more and wounding others. Laurent Léger, a Charlie Hebdo writer, managed to sound the alarm, calling a friend and telling him: “Call the police. It’s carnage, a bloodbath. Everyone is dead.”

Late on Wednesday night, 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 three suspects were not in the property.

The attack was the bloody culmination of a long-simmering struggle between France’s libertarian traditions of free speech and an increasingly extreme strand of Islamism. Witnesses described hearing the attackers shout “Allahu Akbar” as well as “We have avenged the Prophet.” Two eyewitnesses said they 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.

harlie Hebdo, a feisty and irreverent publication with a 44-year history, had been at the very frontline of that battle since 2006, when it first reprinted cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad originally published by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. Its offices were firebombed in 2011 after it published another cartoon of the Muslim prophet.

Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and editor Stéphane Charbonnier, known simply as Charb, refused to back down in the face of repeated threats, raising the stakes by publishing pictures portraying a naked Muhammad in 2012. His was the name the gunmen called out as soon as they burst into the morning conference, and he was the first to die in the attack. Among other victims was one of France’s best-known cartoonists, Jean Cabut, a 75-year-old veteran of the national press known universally as Cabu.

Visiting the scene of France’s worst atrocity in decades barely an hour afterwards, a visibly shocked Hollande described it as “a terrorist attack, without a doubt”. The attack was “an act of exceptional barbarism”, he said. In the number of fatalities, it was the worst single terrorist attack France has suffered for at least 50 years.  

Witnesses described the gunmen as seemingly 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 woman 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.   Read More at  the Guardian

Gunmen who stormed Charlie Hebdo offices ‘may have hadtraining’