PARIS—Explosions and gunshots rang out and smoke rose outside a building, where two brothers suspected in a newspaper massacre were reportedly killed after holing up with up with a hostage on Friday.
Their hostage was safely freed, according to initial news reports.

The move by French commandos came after security forces had surrounded the building for most of the day, cornering the suspects in the killings at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper.

Police tactical forces could be seen on the roof of the building.

Trapped and surrounded, the desperados have only one possible end-game left to them: Going outs in a blaze of martyrdom glory.

The terrorism suspects — brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi — were holed up Friday in a printing factory in Dammartin-en-Goele about 65 kilometres northeast of the Paris, having taken at least one hostage, believed to be a female.

Le Figaro reports that Amedy Coulibaly, 32, the suspected hostage taker in the Hyper Cacher kosher deli in Paris on Friday, is also believed to be the prime suspect in the murder of a French police officer in Paris on Wednesday.

The French publication also reports that Coulibaly knows the Kouachi brothers. It writes that police are investigating
whether Coulibaly went on the attack in hopes of creating a diversion that would let the brothers escape.

The Kouachi brothers have been on the run for 48 hours, since unleashing a massacre in the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

They are clearly prepared to keep killing, having already slain 10 journalists, a police officer and a body guard.

That means the elite SWAT team, with a commander who’s been given the authority to launch an assault, is proceeding gingerly, with the primary objective of “preservation” of the hostage’s life.

The men were pursued to the industrial complex in Dammartin-en-Goele, situated near Charles de Gaulle airport – two runways were closed to avoid interfering with the standoff but have since been reopened – after commandeering yet another car nearby around 10 a.m. At least three helicopters hovered above the town.

They impersonated police officers to get inside the printing plant. Another employee, a salesman, described for a French radio station how he shook hands with one of the men, who then told him to leave the premises. The salesman became alarmed when the men said: “Get out of here, we don’t want to kill civilians.”

Christelle Alleume, who works across the street, said a round of gunfire interrupted her coffee break Friday morning.
“We heard shots and we returned very fast because everyone was afraid,” she told i-Tele. “We had orders to turn off the lights and not approach the windows.”

Various reports – unconfirmed – indicated there had been a shootout earlier in the morning at a checkpoint on the main road leading towards the town. All roads have since been barricaded by police – upwards of 80,000 gendarmeries and soldiers mobilized for the massive manhunt which had concentrated, Thursday night into Friday morning, on densely wooded countryside around two nearby villages.

The printing factory is CTF Creation Tendance Decouverte, with town hall spokesperson Audrey Taupenas telling French media there appeared to be one hostage inside the building.
The town has been sealed off, as a heavy police presence rings the plant in concentric tactical positioning, journalists pushed far back from the site. Three helicopters circled overhead.

Residents of Dammartin-en-Goele have been warned to stay indoors, one of them describing their town as “like a war zone.” It has been on lockdown for hours. The mayor has said all schools in the area were being guarded and the children kept indoors. At least one police sniper has been spotted on the roof of a building opposite from the print works.

While the terrorists may have carried out a carefully formulated plot in their broad daylight assault on Charlie Hebdo Wednesday, they now seem to be improvising on the fly, perhaps never expecting to get this far without a confrontation.

Events today have an eerie similarity to the pursuit of the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, where one of the suspects was discovered hiding in a dry-docked boat in a homeowner’s backyard after his brother had been killed.

But French authorities are more mindful of what transpired in Toulouse in 2012.

In what had been until this week France’s bloodiest terrorist experience in the past half-century, a petty criminal by the name of Mohammed Merah carried out a series of attacks targeting French soldiers and Jewish civilians in Toulouse and Montauban, in the midi-Pyrenees region, killing seven and injuring five.

Merah, of Algerian descent, shot dead a French paratrooper on March 11 but remained on the loose and roaming for victims. Four days later, he shot two uniformed soldiers at a shopping centre in Montauban. On March 19, he turned his attention to the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school, slaying three children.

An elite police unit ultimately surrounded Merah’s apartment building in Toulouse, where a 30-hour standoff ensued as the suspect sporadically communicated with officers on a walkie-talkie.

An official in Dammartin-en-Goele tells The Associated Press that phone contact has been established with the men. A lawmaker inside the command post tells French television the men “want to die as martyrs.”

Overnight, police blew out the window shutters on the apartment unit with a grenade and entered the next morning. Merah emerged from a bathroom, shooting, and jumped out of the window, still firing. He was shot in the head by a sniper.

Two officers were wounded in the confrontation. That’s the scenario authorities are trying to avoid here now.

It’s still unclear whether there’s any connection between the atrocity at Charlie Hebdo and a Thursday morning shooting that killed a unarmed female traffic cop, only a few hundred metres from a Jewish school. But that episode has suddenly veered into hostage territory as well, with reports emerging early Friday afternoon that the man responsible for that murder is holed up, with a hostage, at a Paris kosher shop just east of the Charlie Hebdo offices.

This lends credence to the suspicion that the two shootings – the magazine offices, the traffic officers – were always linked, perhaps the coordinated work of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell in Paris that has been activated.

Well at least the hostages are safe.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on January 09, 2015, 11:11:52 AM

Quote from: Kiyohime on January 09, 2015, 11:09:06 AM

Well at least the hostages are safe.

Media seems to have spoken too soon.

Four of them were unfortunately killed when those in the Kosher supermarket learned the other two suspects had been killed by the police.

And here I was about to laugh that France could keep hostages alive but not Australia