MANHUNT IN A FOREST CAVERN
88,000 troops and police scour woods for Paris killers
THE huge manhunt for the fugitive Al Qaeda killers was focused on a vast cave in a forest in northern France last night as questions mounted about why the gunmen were free to carry out their terrifying attack.
Some 88,000 police and soldiers are involved amid fears that brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi are on a ‘martyrdom mission’ and will die fighting rather than be captured.
Police warned the killers may strike again as Prime Minister Manuel Valls admitted the men were on the radar of the intelligence services and ‘were likely’ to have been under surveillance before the atrocity.
As darkness fell last night, heavily armed police and Special Forces were scouring the woodland 50 miles northeast of Paris. Specialist officers were searching the huge cave hundreds of feet deep for any sign of the gunmen.
The pair left behind their personal identity cards in the Citroen they used for the Charlie Hebdo attack – a move which appeared deliberate, intelligence specialists said. Police now fear they could take hostages or are planning a final ‘spectacular’ before capture. The brothers abandoned their car near the village of Abbaye de Longpont shortly after robbing a petrol station yesterday.
Anti-terror officers found a jihadi flag and a Molotov cocktail in the Renault Clio the gunmen hijacked to escape the French capital – and two men fitting their descriptions were seen running into the Foret de Retz, which covers an area larger than Paris. A petrol station attendant in Villers-Cotterets told police he had seen Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers in the vehicle which had sped away after the men had stolen food and water.
There are fewer than 300 residents in Longpont and armed officers were carrying out house-to-house searches as helicopters with thermal imagery equipment capable of identifying human bodies among the trees were called in.
Several roads had been sealed off and checkpoints mounted by armed police who called in armoured vehicles to provide them with ‘cover’ against men who have already proved to be trained marksmen.
Benoit Verdun, the manager of the Abbaye hotel in Longpont, said: ‘The forest around here is enormous, so if the brothers have gone in there it will be quite a hunt.’
A cave complex several hundred feet deep was also being searched. Fleury resident Veronique La Mer, who lives within 50 yards of the cave, said: ‘We are afraid. I didn’t sleep at all last night. The police told us to stay inside in our houses. We have seen police swarming the villages all day and helicopters over our heads. These woods are huge. You could easily hide out here for weeks and there are lots of caves. The atmosphere in town is very strange. At 6pm the streets were deserted.’
Beatrice Le Frans, another resident, said balaclava-clad men carrying machine guns thumped on her door demanding to be let in.
‘I thought they were the terrorists,’ she said. ‘They were trying to break down my door. But then they said they were the police. Luckily I have three grown-up sons here, otherwise I would be very scared.’
Mr Valls said France was facing a terrorist threat ‘without precedent’, adding: ‘Because they were known, they had been followed.’
When and why that surveillance was dropped were two of the many questions being asked yesterday as a senior American counter-terror-
ism official confirmed that the brothers were on the US no-fly list.
But officials were tight-lipped about what else they know about them, including whether they fought in the Middle East with extremist groups.
CNN reported that the US ‘ was given information from the French intelligence agency that Said Kouachi traveled to Yemen as late as 2011 on behalf of the Al Qaeda affiliate there’.
The network said Said received a variety of weapons training from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), including on how to fire weapons. It added: ‘It is also possible Said was trained in bomb making.’
In 2008, Cherif Kouachi was sentenced to three years in jail for his association with an underground organisation. While in jail, he came under the influence of the one-time British- based terrorist Djemal Beghal, who was sentenced to ten years in prison by the French courts for terrorist offenders.
But despite the security services knowing the men were radicalised and suspected of having been trained in military tactics in east Yemen by Al Qaeda, they were not under surveillance on Wednesday.
Last night there had already been several revenge attacks, with shots fired at a Muslim prayer room in the southern town of Port-la-Nouvelle. A Muslim family was shot at in their car in Caromb, in southern Vaucluse, while ‘Death to Arabs’ was daubed on a mosque in Poitiers, central France.