As French police continue to search for two men involved in the attack on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris Wednesday, a second deadly shooting occurred in the city’s southern suburbs on Thursday morning.
CNN reports:
A police officer was shot there, and she died. And about 20 heavily armed police have an apartment building surrounded, pushing crowds back from the area.
Witnesses said the gunman, dressed in black like the Charlie Hebdo attackers and apparently wearing a bulletproof vest, got out of a car as police officers were dealing with a traffic accident and fired at two of them. The suspect hasn’t been captured.
It is unclear whether Thursday’s shooting in the Montrouge suburb is related to the Wednesday attack.
USA Today has more on the ongoing manhunt for the Charlie Hebdo shooting suspects:
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said there were “several arrests” overnight in the hunt for two terror suspects after three gunmen, wearing hoods and armed with Kalashnikov automatic rifles, stormed the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, shouting Islamic phrases and killing 12 people.
Valls told RTL radio that seven people had been arrested since the attack, Reuters reported.
The suspected terrorist shooters are brothers, one of whom is well known to French law enforcement. Cherif Kouachi, now 32, served 18 months in prison on terrorism charges in 2008.
A third suspect, Mourad Hamyd,18, surrendered at a police station in Charleville-Mezieres, a small town in France’s eastern Champagne region, Paris prosecutor’s spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre said, the Associated Press reported. She did not specify his relationship to the Kouachi brothers.
According to The Guardian, Wednesday’s attack was not the first of its kind on the newspaper:
In November 2011, the magazine’s offices were fire-bombed after it published a special edition, supposedly guest-edited by the prophet Muhammad and temporarily renamed “Charia Hebdo”. The cover was a cartoon of Muhammad threatening readers with “a hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing”.
The petrol bomb attack destroyed the Paris offices, the magazine’s website was hacked and staff including the editor were subjected to death threats. But that did not deter Charbonnier. Six days later, the magazine published a front page depicting a male Charlie Hebdo cartoonist passionately kissing a bearded Muslim man in front of the charred aftermath of the bombing. The headline was “L’Amour plus fort que la haine” – Love is stronger than hate.
Watch a video from The Guardian on the story and the vigils held to pay homage to the 12 victims in the attack, AFTER THE JUMP…
