January 9, 2015

French police today stormed the hideout of two brothers–Said and Cherif Kouachi–suspected of murdering 12 people at a Paris newspaper on January 7. After shooting the brothers, the police freed their single hostage unharmed.

The Kouachi brothers, armed with assault rifles, are believed to have shot dead 12 people at the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The attackers were heard shouting, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” and “God is Great” in Arabic as they fled the scene of the crime. French President Francois Hollande described the massacre as a terrorist attack “of exceptional barbarity.” The satirical weekly was firebombed in November 2011, one day after it ran a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

Also today in Paris, police launched a raid on a kosher supermarket where an alleged associate of the Kouachi brothers had also taken hostages. According to police, the gunman in the supermarket had threatened to kill his hostages if the Kouachi brothers–then holed up in a printing plant near Dammartin-en-Goële, 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Paris–were attacked. The French newspaper Le Monde reported that while some of the hostages escaped unharmed, at least four were killed before police shot and killed the terrorist.

The Kouachi brothers were French citizens, born in Paris to parents of Algerian descent. They were apparently well known to French police, and United States officials have confirmed that  their names had for years been on U.S. “no-fly” terror lists. A third suspect in the January 7 massacre–Cherif Houachi’s brother in law–has turned himself into the police.