PARIS: The siege in Paris ended as two brothers suspected for shooting 12 people at the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo were killed on Friday in a police assault on the print works north of Paris where they had been holed up with a hostage. While four hostages were also killed, others were free and safe. A female suspect is still on the loose who is believed to have killed a policewoman on Wednesday.
The hostage-taker at another stand-off at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris was dead after a police operation there. That hostage-taker was believed to have links to al-Qaida as the two brothers.
One police official said the hostage taken by the Kouachi brothers at the print works in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele was safe.
The fate of all the hostages believed to have been held at the supermarket in eastern Paris was not immediately clear.
The two al-Qaida-linked brothers came out with guns blazing, prompting an assault on the printing plant where they had been hold up with a hostage, a French police official said. They were killed and their hostage was freed, authorities said.
Moments later, several people were seen being led out of the Porte de Vincennes grocery store but security forces could still be seen moving around. It was not clear exactly how many hostages had been at the store or how many were freed.
France has been high alert since the country's worst terror attack in decades - the massacre Wednesday in Paris at Charlie Hebdo.
Two groups of terrorists had seized hostages at separate locations around the French capital Friday, facing off against thousands of French security forces as the city shut down a famed Jewish neighborhood and scrambled to protect residents and tourists from further attacks.
By Friday afternoon, explosions and gunshots rang out and white smoke rose outside a printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris, where brothers Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34, had holed up with a hostage. He was reportedly hiding in cardboard box and the Kouachi brothers didn't know he was there.
Security forces had surrounded the building for most of the day. After the explosions, a police SWAT forces could be seen on the roof of the building and one police helicopter landed near it.
Audrey Taupenas, spokeswoman for the town near the Charles de Gaulle airport, said the brothers had died in the clash.
Minutes before the storming, a gunman in a Paris kosher grocery store had threatened to kill his five hostages if French authorities launched an assault on the two brothers, a police official said. The two sets of hostage-takers know each other, said the official, who was not authorised to discuss the rapidly developing situations with the media.
Trying to fend off further attacks, the Paris mayor's office shut down all shops along Rosiers Street in the city's famed Marais neighborhood in the heart of the tourist district. Hours before the Jewish Sabbath, the street is usually crowded with shoppers - French Jews and tourists alike. The street is also only a kilometer (a half mile) away from Charlie Hebdo's offices.
At the kosher grocery near the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood in Paris, the gunman burst in shooting just a few hours before the Jewish Sabbath began, declaring "You know who I am," the official recounted. The attack came before sundown when the store would have been crowded with shoppers.
The official said the gunman is also believed responsible for the roadside killing of a Paris policewoman on Thursday.
Paris police released a photo of the gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, and a second suspect, a woman named Hayet Boumddiene, who the official said was his accomplice.
Several people wounded when the gunman opened fire in the kosher grocery were able to flee and get medical care, the official said.
Police said 100 students were under lockdown in schools nearby and the highway ringing Paris was closed.
Hours before and 40 kilometers (25 miles) away , a convoy of police trucks, helicopters and ambulances streamed toward Dammartin-en-Goele, a small industrial town near Charles de Gaulle airport, to seize the Charlie Hebdo suspects, who had hijacked a car in a nearby town after more than two days on the run.
"They said they want to die as martyrs," Yves Albarello, a local lawmaker inside the command post, told French television station i-Tele.
Cherif Kouachi, 32, was convicted of terrorism charges in 2008 for ties to a network sending jihadis to fight U.S. forces in Iraq.
A Yemeni security official said his 34-year-old brother, Said Kouachi, is suspected of having fought for al-Qaida in Yemen. Another senior security official said Said was in Yemen until 2012.
Both brothers were also on the U.S. no-fly list, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss foreign intelligence publicly.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister has tweeted saying he has accepted French President Hollande's invitation to join the Unity Rally in Paris on Sunday to celebrate the "values behind Charlie Hebdo".
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