Three days of terror in France have ended, but not without more bloodshed.
A gunman identified as Amedy Coulibaly, who is suspected of killing a female police officer on Thursday, stormed a Jewish grocery store Friday, taking more than a dozen hostages and fatally shooting four other shoppers.
Police eventually raided the kosher store, and according to The Guardian, “French media reported that police timed their raid on the supermarket as Coulibaly was at prayer: he reportedly used the store’s phone and failed to hang up.”
At nearly the same time, a second raid was underway at a small printing company in a town about 25 miles outside of Paris. It was there that the two brothers suspected in the dozen deaths at Charlie Hebdo magazine, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, were holed up. The brothers were killed as they emerged from the building shooting at police, after telling police they wanted to die as martyrs.
It’s since been revealed that a French television station had been in telephone contact with one of the brothers who told them he had been sent “by al-Qaida Yemen.” Later Friday, an al-Qaida member from Yemen did indeed claim the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Now attention turns to mourning those lost in the past couple of violent days and to the search for Coulibaly’s suspected accomplice and girlfriend Hayat Boumeddiene. Originally suspected as having been in the kosher grocery store with Coulibaly, now there are reports she wasn’t even in the country at the time. Sources say she traveled to Spain, then flew to Turkey before attempting to cross into Syria on foot.
BONUS READ: This is an interesting article about how Middle Eastern newspapers covered the killings in Paris. Some described the Charlie Hebdo attack as a “massacre” rather than “terrorism.”
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