Paris: French Prime Minister Manuel Valls says there were 'several arrests' overnight in the hunt for two suspects in the deadly shooting at a satirical newspaper.
In an interview with RTL radio Thursday, Valls said preventing another attack 'is our main concern,' as he explained why authorities released photos of the two men along with a plea for witnesses to come forward.
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Twelve people died in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly newspaper that had been threatened before for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed. France declared a national day of mourning on Thursday.
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One man sought in the deadly shooting at a French satirical paper has turned himself in, and police hunted Thursday for two heavily armed men with possible links to al Qaeda in the military-style, methodical killing of 12 people at the office of a satirical newspaper that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad.
President Francois Hollande, visiting the scene of France's deadliest such attack in more than half a century, called the assault on the weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo "an act of exceptional barbarism."
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France raised its terror alert system to the maximum, Attack Alert and bolstered security with more than 800 extra soldiers to guard media offices, places of worship, transport and other sensitive areas. Fears had been running high in France and elsewhere in Europe that jihadis trained in warfare abroad would stage attacks at home.
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French brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, in their early 30s, should be considered armed and dangerous, according to a police bulletin released early Thursday. Mourad Hamyd, 18, surrendered at a police station in Charleville-Mezieres, a small town in France's eastern Champagne region, said Paris prosecutor's spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre. She did not offer details on Hamyd's relationship with the men.
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Heavily armed police moved into the nearby city of Reims, searching for the suspects without success, Thibault-Lecuivre said. Video from BFM-TV showed police dressed in white apparently taking samples inside an apartment. It was not immediately clear who lived there.
