Police Hunt For Terror Suspects

Two armed suspects wanted over the Charlie Hebdo massacre were tonight being pursued through woodland as a huge manhunt closed in on a forest.

Police believe they have tracked down the brothers to a remote area about 50 miles north-east of Paris after reportedly robbing a nearby petrol station.

Officers are said to have found a Molotov cocktail bomb and jihadist flag in the car of Cherif and Said Kouachi, which they abandoned before fleeing.

The men, still armed, headed on foot into the vast Forêt de Retz (Retz Forest) that measures 32,000 acres, an area roughly the size of Paris.

The dramatic manhunt came after it emerged the 'armed and dangerous' brothers had links to terror groups stretching back almost a decade. 

Their alleged getaway driver Hamyd Mourad, 18, has already turned himself into police in Charleville-Mezieres in northern France.

Both Said Kouachi, 34, and his brother, Cherif Kouachi, 32, were first arrested in 2005 as suspected members of the Buttes Chaumont – a group operating out of the 19th arrondissement of Paris and sending terrorist fighters to Iraq.

In 2008, Cherif was sentenced to three years in prison for terror offences – but served just 18 months.

He had wanted to fly to Iraq via Syria, and was found with a manual for a Kalashnikov – the automatic weapon used in Wednesday's attack.  

 

Said was freed after questioning by police, but – like his brother – was known to have been radicalised after the Iraq War of 2003, when Anglo-American forces deposed Saddam Hussein.

Both brothers were said to be infuriated by the killing of Muslims by western soldiers and war planes.

Vincent Olliviers, Cherif's lawyer at the time, described him as initially being an 'apprentice loser' - a delivery boy in a cap who smoked hashish and delivered pizzas to buy his drugs.

After his short prison sentence, Cherif was in 2010 linked with a plot to free Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, the mastermind of the 1995 bombing of the St Michel metro station in Paris that killed eight people and wounded more than 100 more.

Said and Cherif, both orphans, were born in Paris but grew up in foster care in Renne, Brittany. They returned to Paris aged 18. 

  *May their souls Rest In Peace*