Two brothers suspected of attacking the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were killed when police stormed their hideout on Friday while their hostage was freed, a police official said.
The Charlie Hebdo gunmen have been identified as brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi.
A police source said at least four other hostages had been killed at a separate siege at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris.
The supermarket hostage taker, identified as Amedy Coulibaly, was killed yesterday in a stand-off with police.
A fourth attacker, believed to be an accomplice of Coulibaly’s in the earlier shooting of a police officer and whose role in the supermarket hostage-taking is being investigated, has escaped.
The sole female militant in the double attack in Paris, she has been identified as Hayat Boumeddiene.
The two brothers died when security forces moved in on a print works in the small town of Dammartin-en-Goele, north east of Paris, where the chief suspects in Wednesday’s attack had been holed up with their hostage.
A police source said the hostage-taker at the Jewish supermarket, who is believed to have had links to the same Islamist group as the brothers, had also been killed.
The print works at Dammartin-en-Goele, set in marsh and woodland, had been under siege since the gunmen abandoned a high-speed car chase and took refuge there early on Friday.
The gunmen killed 12 people in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo weekly, which raised questions about surveillance of radicals, far-right politics, religion and censorship in a land struggling to integrate its five-million Muslim citizens, the EU’s largest Muslim community.
Security sources said the French-born brothers of Algerian origin had been under surveillance and had been placed on European and US “no-fly” lists.
Sources said the three men were all members of the same Paris cell that a decade ago sent young French volunteers to Iraq to fight US forces. Cherif Kouachi served 18 months in prison for his role in the group.
The fugitive suspects are both in their early 30s, and were already under police surveillance. One was jailed for 18 months for trying to travel to Iraq a decade ago to fight as part of an Islamist cell. US and European sources close to the investigation said on Thursday that one of the brothers, Said Kouachi, was in Yemen in 2011 for several months training with AQAP, one of the group’s most active affiliates.
A Yemeni official familiar with the matter said the Yemen government was aware of the possibility of a connection between Said Kouachi and AQAP, and was looking into any possible links.
US government sources said Said Kouachi and his brother Cherif Kouachi were listed in two US security databases, a highly classified database containing information on 1.2 million possible counter-terrorism suspects, called TIDE, and the much smaller “no-fly” list maintained by the Terrorist Screening Centre, an inter-agency unit.
The gunmen shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) as they carried out the attack on satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, which has been described by President Francois Hollande and other world leaders as an attack on the fundamentals of democracy.
French people held a national day of mourning on Thursday. The bells of Notre Dame pealed for those killed in the attack on the left-leaning slayer of sacred cows whose cartoonists have been national figures since the Parisian counter-cultural heyday of the 1960s and 1970s.
Amid local media reports of isolated incidents of violence directed at Muslims in France, Hollande and his Socialist government have called on the French not to blame the Islamic faith for the Charlie Hebdo killings.
Hollande has held talks with opposition leaders and, in a rare move, invited Marine Le Pen, leader of the resurgent anti-immigrant National Front, to his Elysee Palace for discussions on Friday.
The younger brother’s jail sentence for trying to fight in Iraq a decade ago, and more recent tangles with the authorities over suspected involvement in militant plots, raised questions over whether police could have done more to watch them.
Cherif Kouachi was arrested on January 25, 2005 preparing to fly to Syria en route to Iraq. He served 18 months of a three-year sentence.
“He was part of a group of young people who were a little lost, confused, not really fanatics in the proper sense of the word,” lawyer Vincent Ollivier, who represented Cherif in the case, told Liberation daily.
In 2010 he was suspected of being part of a group that tried to break from prison Smain Ali Belkacem, a militant jailed for the 1995 bombings of Paris train and metro stations that killed eight people and wounded 120. The case against Cherif Kouachi was dismissed for lack of evidence.
