09 Jan 2015
Paris - France, where police ended two hostage dramas Friday killing Islamist brothers wanted for the Charlie Hebdo massacre and a third suspected extremist who attacked a Jewish supermarket, has the biggest Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe.
Between 500 000 and 600 000-strong, France's Jewish community is also the third biggest in the world, after Israel and the United States.
France's
Muslims are estimated at between four and five million. - AFP
09 Jan 2015
09 Jan 2015
Paris and Dammartin-en-Gole - First the long, agonising wait. Then fireballs, bullets - and suddenly France's terror nightmare reached a dramatic and bloody end.
Parisians ran in terror amid shooting and explosions while in a small town nearby two Islamist hostage-takers died in a blaze of gunfire on a day when the heart of France resembled a warzone.
The kind of violence that seemed unimaginable in the City of Light brought to an end more than two days of brutal tension as police hunted the Islamist gunmen who had massacred 12 people at a satirical weekly magazine Wednesday.
In eastern Paris, police stormed a Jewish supermarket where at least one gunman had earlier taken several people hostage.
Explosions rocked the neighbourhood - one lighting up the shopfront in a fireball - and shooting erupted as the commandos burst in."It's war!" screamed a mother as she dragged her daughter from the scene.
The gunman was killed along with four hostages, but as the siege ended several others fled to safety.
Ambulances raced to the scene, joining a jam of police vans and other emergency vehicles, all under the eye of helicopters.
Moments before, other special forces assaulted a printers' business in Dammartin-en-Goele outside the capital, where the two main suspects in the Charlie Hebdo massacre had holed up with one hostage.
Explosions
rang out and smoke poured from the roof of the building. The two
brothers inside, who had led thousands of police on a wild manhunt for
more than 48 hours, ran out in a desperate last stand and were gunned
down. The hostage was saved. - AFP
09 Jan 2015
London - British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Friday he would join in the mass rally being staged in Paris in the wake of the massacre at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
"I've accepted President Hollande's invitation to join the Unity Rally in Paris this Sunday - celebrating the values behind Charlie Hebdo", he said on his personal Twitter account.
09 Jan 2015
09 Jan 2015
09 Jan 2015
09 Jan 2015
09 Jan 2015
The two brothers wanted for the shooting of 12 people at the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo were killed in a raid on Friday by security forces on the print works where they were holed up with a hostage, a government source said.
Separately, Le Monde newspaper quoted a police official as saying that the hostage-taker at a separate stand-off at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris had also been killed.
That hostage-taker is believed to have links to the same Islamist group as the two brothers.
French television images showed some people running out of the supermarket in eastern Paris. The exact fate of all the hostages there and at the one at the print works was not immediately clear. - Reuters
