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Charlie Hebdo attack



PM: France ‘still under threat from attacks by Paris gunmen’s associates’









Manuel Valls’s warning as man linked to Charlie Hebdo killers arrested in Bulgaria and Coulibaly linked with jogger’s shooting














Manuel Valls, the prime minister, warns a special assembly of the French parliament after the attacks in Paris and on Charlie Hebdo. Photograph: Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images




Julian Borger, 
Anne Penketh and 
Kim Willsher in Paris


Tuesday 13 January 2015 15.10 EST







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France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, warned on Tuesday that the country was still under threat from accomplices of the gunmen who terrorised Paris last week and from global terrorist networks.
Valls, addressing a special session of the French parliament in memory of the victims, said that “very great and very serious risks remain”, as the manhunt for suspected accomplices to last week’s attacks widened. It emerged that an associate of one of the gunmen had been arrested in Bulgaria a few days earlier, allegedly on the way to join Islamic State (Isis) jihadists in Syria.
Investigators are looking into the possibility that a jogger wounded on Wednesday, at the onset of last week’s bloodshed in Paris, may have been the victim of an unknown fourth gunman. And the police are still looking for an accomplice who filmed, edited and posted online a video of one of the killers justifying his actions.
The man who escorted the partner of another of the gunmen as she fled to Syria last week was revealed to have connections to a separate network helping volunteer jihadists travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“The global threat is still present. Serious and very high risks remain, those linked to possible accomplices, or those coming from networks, terrorists who give orders, or cyberattacks,” Valls said.
“I owe you the truth,” he told the national assembly. “To confront them, soldiers, police and gendarmes have been mobilised.”
Valls promised “exceptional measures” and an “implacable response”.
The picture emerging from the investigation so far is that the killers were drawn from an underground jihadist culture made up of overlapping circles of acquaintances, often former prison friends, with loose affiliations to al-Qaida and Isis.
The man detained in Bulgaria, Fritz-Joly Joachin, is a 29-year old Haitian-Frenchman who was stopped at a border checkpoint as he tried to cross into Turkey in the early hours of New Year’s Day. His ex-wife had alleged he had abducted their three year-old son and was taking him to Syria to be brought up by Isis jihadists, a charge Joachin has denied.
Darina Slavova, a Bulgarian prosecutor in the border town of Haskovo, told the Reuters news agency that a second arrest warrant alleges Joachin had been in contact with Chérif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who killed 12 people in a gun attack on the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday. Slavova did not make clear the nature of the alleged contacts and Joachin denied any wrongdoing.
“I have friends but if they have committed crimes I cannot be held responsible for that,” he told a Bulgarian judge on Tuesday.
New video footage emerged on Tuesday showing Chérif Kouachi and his brother Saïd calming reloading their rifles in the street moment after the Charlie Hebdo murders, and shouting: “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed. We have killed Charlie Hebdo”, before driving off in a small black car. The video, posted online by Sky News, shows the car drive up to an approaching police vehicle on a narrow road and the brothers opening fire, forcing the police car to reverse rapidly back up the street.








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New footage of Paris gunmen moments after Charlie Hebdo attack. Source: Reuters


More details emerged on Tuesday of another suspected accomplice, Mehdi Belhouchine. The 23-year-old bearded Frenchman was pictured at immigration at Istanbul airport on 2 January accompanying Hayat Boumeddiene, named as a wanted fugitive after the attacks. Boumeddiene was the partner of another of the gunmen, Amedy Coulibaly, who shot dead a trainee Paris policewoman last Thursday before taking hostages in a kosher supermarket on the eastern rim of Paris, and killing four of them before being shot by police on Friday night.
Le Monde reported that Belhouchine was known to the French police as his elder brother, Mohamed, was sentenced to two years in prison in July last year for his part in a network involved in the channelling of French volunteer jihadists to fight in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mohamed Belhouchine was said to have shown recent combat videos from the region to the recruits in a Paris flat. Mehdi Belhouchine came along with his brother, witnesses said, but only played computer games while the jihadist videos were being shown.
It is unclear whether Belhouchine was simply acting as an escort for Boumeddiene or also had links to her partner Coulibaly.
President Francois Hollande suggested for the first time on Tuesday that when Coulibaly shot a 26 year-old policewoman in the back in the district of Montrouge last Thursday, he could have been on his way to attack a Jewish school only 100 yards away, but was forced to flee.
Coulibaly is also linked to an attack on a jogger shot three times in the back in the south Paris neighbourhood of Fontenay-aux-Roses last Wednesday. According to a report on the Le Parisien news website, five bullet cases were found at the scene which had been fired by a Tokarev pistol Coulibaly had in the supermarket. However, before sinking into a coma, the jogger said his attacker had been “European”. Coulibaly was of African origin, the Parisian-born son of Senegalese immigrants.
At the weekend the police discovered an apartment Coulibaly had rented for a week, from 4 January to 11 January, in the nearby suburb of Gentilly. Here they found four more Tokarevs, a revolver, ammunition, several mobile phones, teargas canisters, a blue police light, a bulletproof vest and binoculars. They are reported to have found fingerprints in the flat of several different people.
According to press reports, the sub-machine gun that Coulibaly used in the Hyper Cacher supermarket had been bought on the black market in Belgium, as had the assault rifle and rocket-propelled grenade launcher wielded by the Kouachi brothers. One report claimed the rifle and launcher had been bought near the Gare du Midi in Brussels for €5,000 (£3,900).
Police investigators have also been studying the video of Coulibaly declaring his allegiance to Isis and trying to rationalise his actions. Captions had been added to his video testimony describing his actions, which could only have been written after he was shot by police at the Jewish supermarket on Friday. The video was posted on Sunday.
A police source was quoted on the Liberation website saying that the video had been uploaded abroad, and that either it had been the work of Boumeddiene after she had fled France for Syria or “an unknown individual was responsible”.
• This article was amended on 14 January 2015 to correct the spelling of Fontenay-aux-roses.



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Iranian newspaper shut down for showing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo

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Published: 19 Jan 2015




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Survey, in wake of Charlie Hebdo attack, also finds 68% feel citizens should be forbidden from returning to France after fighting with Islamist groups abroad



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Published: 15 Jan 2015




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France clamours for Charlie Hebdo as news kiosks sell out




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