France in mourning amid manhunt for ‘Hebdo’ killer brothers

French police today extended a manhunt for two brothers suspected of the methodical killing of 12 people at satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, in Paris in a presumed Islamist militant strike that national leaders and allied states described as an assault on democracy.

Journalists, policemen, and emergency services in the street of the shooting, a few hours after the January 2015 attack

France began a day of mourning for the journalists and police officers shot dead on Wednesday by black-hooded gunmen using Kalashnikov assault rifles. French tricolour flags flew at half-mast throughout the country (See: Manhunt on as terror attack in Paris leaves at least 12 dead).

Police released photos of the two French nationals still at large, calling them "armed and dangerous" - brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, aged 32 and 34, both of whom were already under watch by security services.

Cherif had already served time on terrorism charges and had a history of funnelling jihadi fighters to Iraq. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison after being convicted of terrorism charges in 2008 for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency.

He said at the time of his conviction that he was outraged at the torture of Iraqi inmates at the US prison at Abu Ghraib near Baghdad and "really believed in the idea" of fighting the US-led coalition in Iraq.

A third man, Mourad Hamyd, 18, surrendered at a police station in a small town in the eastern region after learning his name was linked to the attacks in the news and social media, said Paris prosecutor's spokesperson Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre. She did not specify his relationship to the Kouachi brothers.

France 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.

Fears had been running high in Europe that jihadis trained in warfare abroad would stage attacks at home. The French suspect in a deadly attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium had returned from fighting with extremists in Syria; and the man who rampaged in the south of France in 2012, killing three soldiers and four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse, received paramilitary training in Pakistan.

Methodical murder
The drama began in broad daylight in a quiet Paris street when the masked, black-clad men with assault rifles stormed the offices near Paris' Bastille monument in the Wednesday noontime attack as the journalists were in an editorial meeting, first shooting a person in the reception area.

The publication had long drawn condemnation and threats for its depictions of Islam, although it also satirised other religions and political figures. It was firebombed in 2011.

One witness to Wednesday's attack said the gunmen were so methodical he at first mistook them for an elite anti-terrorism squad.

Image of the cover of Charlie Hebdo, renamed Charia Hebdo. The bubble reads "100 lashes if you don't die of laughter!".

The staff was in an editorial meeting and the gunmen headed straight for the paper's editor, Stephane Charbonnier - widely known by his pen name Charb - killing him and his police bodyguard first, said Christophe Crepin, a police union spokesperson.

Shouting "Allahu akbar!" as they fired, the men used fluent, unaccented French as they called out the names of specific employees.

Eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor were killed, said prosecutor Francois Molins. He said 11 people were wounded - four of them seriously. One person survived by hiding under a table.

The other dead were identified as cartoonists Georges Wolinski and Berbard Verlhac, better known as Tignous, and Jean Cabut, known as "Cabu." Also killed was Bernard Maris, an economist who was a contributor to the newspaper and was heard regularly on French radio.

Chilling amateur video footage filmed after the carnage then showed the killers outside, running toward a wounded policeman as he lay on the pavement. Then they fired on a police officer.

Two gunmen strolled out to a black car waiting below, one of them calmly shooting a wounded police officer in the head as he writhed on the ground, according to video and a man who watched in fear from his home across the street.

"They knew exactly what they had to do and exactly where to shoot. While one kept watch and checked that the traffic was good for them, the other one delivered the final coup de grace," said the witness, who refused to allow his name to be used because he feared for his safety.

"Hey! We avenged the Prophet Muhammad! We killed Charlie Hebdo," one of the men shouted in French, according to video shot from a nearby building.

One police official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network, and Cedric Le Bechec, a witness who encountered the escaping gunmen, quoted the attackers as saying: "You can tell the media that it's al-Qaeda in Yemen."

After fleeing, the attackers collided with another vehicle, then carjacked another car before disappearing in broad daylight, Molins said.

Le Bechec, the witness who encountered the gunmen in another part of Paris, described on his Facebook page seeing two men "get out of a bullet-ridden car with a rocket-launcher in hand, eject an old guy from his car and calmly say hi to the public, saying 'you can tell the media that it's al-Qaeda in Yemen.'"