January 9, 2015

UPDATE: AFP reports all suspects were killed in the dual-location assault. Warehouse hostage alive. Waiting for official confirmation.

UPDATE: AFP: Explosions were seen and gunshots heard as French special forces storm the printing warehouse where suspects are holed up. In a coordinated action, police also stormed the kosher grocery store where hostages where also held.

This is the third day France is gripped by this situation:

PARIS — French police were confronted with two hostage standoffs Friday as two suspects in the terror attack on a satirical newspaper were cornered in a small industrial town northeast of Paris Friday and a third gunman was holding as many as five people at gunpoint at a kosher supermarket 35 miles to the south.

The AFP news agency reported that two people were killed in the second incident at the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris, but that could not be immediately confirmed by officials.

The simultaneous hostage-takings came as the intense manhunt for the two suspects in the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris on Wednesday had been cornered in the in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele, near Charles de Gaulle airport.

The suspects, Cherif Kouachi, 32, and his older brother Said, 34, took refuge in a small printing warehouse and seized at least one person hostage, according to a town official.

The two brothers are wanted for the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris on Wednesday in retaliation for what they said was the publishing of cartoons denigrating the prophet Mohammed.

"They said they want to die as martyrs," Yves Albarello, a local lawmaker who said he was inside the police command post in the town, told French television station i-Tele.

Police established contact by phone with the suspects and convinced them to allow the evacuation of some 1,000 students in nearby schools. French TV showed a line of buses brought into town to remove the children.

In Paris, meanwhile, a third gunman believed to be linked to the killing of a policewoman south of the capital on Thursday took as many as five people hostage at a kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes, according to France's anti-terrorism prosecutor.

A police official, who was not authorized to speak about the situation, said the man opened fire in the kosher market, near Paris' Porte de Vincennes, and declared "you know who I am."

The second hostage-taking in eastern Paris came after French police said that there is a "connection" between the pair accused in the assault on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a suspect identified in the shooting of the policewoman, according to the AFP news agency. That suspect had disappeared for a day after fleeing into a metro.

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