Paris Terror Attack

A Bulgarian prosecutor announced they had a man in custody with ties to one of the brothers

(PARIS) — The weapons used by a terror cell to kill 17 people around Paris came from outside the country and authorities are urgently tracing the source of the financing, a French police official said Tuesday.

Christophe Crepin, a French police union representative, said several people were being sought in relation to the “substantial” financing of the three gunmen, as well as others in their network. He said the weapons stockpile clearly came from abroad and the amount spent shows an organized network.

The news came hours after a Bulgarian prosecutor announced they had a man in custody with ties to one of the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo newspaper massacre.

French police say as many as six members of the terrorist cell that carried out the Paris attacks may still be at large, including a man seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen. The country has deployed 10,000 troops to protect sensitive sites, including Jewish schools and synagogues, mosques and travel hubs.

Earlier in the day, in ceremonies thousands of miles apart, France and Israel paid tribute to the victims of the terror attacks.

At police headquarters in Paris, French President Francois Hollande paid tribute to the three police officers killed in the attacks, placing Legion of Honor medals on their caskets.

“They died so that we could live free,” he said, flanked by hundreds of police officers.

Hollande vowed that France will be “merciless in the face of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslims acts, and unrelenting against those who defend and carry out terrorism, notably the jihadists who go to Iraq and Syria.”

As Chopin’s funeral march played in central Paris and the caskets draped in French flags were led from the building, a procession began in Jerusalem for the four Jewish victims of the attack Friday on a kosher supermarket in Paris.

“Returning to your ancestral home need not be due to distress, out of desperation, amidst destruction, or in the throes of terror and fear,” said Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. “Terror has never kept us down, and we do not want terror to subdue you. The Land of Israel is the land of choice. We want you to choose Israel, because of a love for Israel.”

Defying the bloodshed and terror of last week, a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad is to appear Wednesday on the cover of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, weeping and holding a placard with the words “I am Charlie.” Above him is emblazoned: “All is forgiven” — a phrase one writer said meant to show that the survivors of the attacks forgave the gunmen.

“I think that those who have been killed, if they were here, they would have been able to have a coffee today with the terrorists and just talk to them, ask them why they have done this,” columnist Zineb El Rhazoui told the BBC. “We feel, as Charlie Hebdo’s team, that we need to forgive the two terrorists who have killed our colleagues.”

Two masked gunmen opened the onslaught in Paris with a Jan. 7 attack on the paper, singling out its editor and his police bodyguard for the first shots before killing 12 people in all. Ahmed Merabet, a French Muslim policeman, was one of the victims, killed as he lay wounded on the ground as the gunmen — brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi — made their escape.

Charlie Hebdo, which lampoons religion indiscriminately, had received threats after depicting Muhammed before, and its offices were firebombed in 2011.

France’s main Muslim organization called Tuesday for calm, fearing that a new Muhammad cartoon could inflame passions anew.

Amid the hunt for accomplices, Bulgarian authorities said Tuesday they have a Frenchman under arrest who is believed to have links to Cherif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers.

Fritz-Joly Joachin, 29, was arrested Jan. 1 as he tried to cross into Turkey, under two European arrest warrants, one citing his alleged links to a terrorist organization and a second for allegedly kidnapping his 3-year-old son and smuggling him out of the country, said Darina Slavova, the regional prosecutor for Bulgaria’s southern province of Haskovo.

“He met with Kouachi several times at the end of December,” Slavova said.

The Kouachi brothers and their friend, Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages in the Paris grocery, died Friday in clashes with French police. All three claimed ties to Islamic extremists in the Middle East — the Kouachis to al-Qaida in Yemen and Coulibaly to the Islamic State group.

Two French police officials told The Associated Press that authorities were searching around Paris for the Mini Cooper registered to Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s widow, who Turkish officials say is now in Syria.

One of the police officials said the Paris terror cell consisted of about 10 members and that “five or six could still be at large,” but he did not provide their names. The other official said the cell was made up of about eight people and included Boumeddiene.

Video has emerged of Coulibaly explaining how the attacks in Paris would unfold. French police want to find the person or persons who shot and posted the video, which was edited after Friday’s attacks.

Ties among the three attackers themselves date back to at least 2005, when Coulibaly and Cherif Kouachi were jailed together.

Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten, Nicolas Vaux-Montagny, and John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris and Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria, contributed.

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Cover features a depiction of Muhammad with a sign reading "Je Suis Charlie"

Details are emerging about the first issue of Paris-based satirical newsweekly Charlie Hebdo since gunmen stormed its office last week, killing 12 people in an attack that ignited worldwide shows of solidarity and fanned European fears about homegrown terrorism.

With its previous office now a crime scene, the remaining staff essentially relocated to Libération, a left-wing daily, which lent workspace to surviving staffers where they could plan it all out under increased security.

Libération began to circulate the cover image Monday evening. Drawn by veteran Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Rénald Luzier, known as Luz, the cover depicts the Prophet Muhammad, with a falling tear drop, holding a sign that reads Je Suis Charlie. That phrase, “I am Charlie,” is a nod to the hashtag that became a rallying cry of solidarity for the paper in the aftermath of the attack. Above the caricature is the phrase Tout est Pardonné, or “All is forgiven.”

The issue, to be published Wednesday, is expected to be translated into 16 languages. The New York Times, which got an inside look at the production, reports that it will feature tributes to, and old cartoons by, those who died in last week’s attack. Charlie Hebdo typically publishes 60,000 copies but, with the help of Libération, it will print 3 million copies of this issue.

“There will be a newspaper. There will be no interruption,” said editor-in-chief Gerard Briard at a press conference on Tuesday. “Freedom of the press in a democracy is an institution.”

“This isn’t an issue produced by crybabies,” Gérard Biard, the newspaper’s new editor, told France Info.

In 2011, the Charlie Hebdo office was firebombed after it announced the Prophet Muhammad would become its next editor-in-chief. In 2012, Charlie Hebdo printed a cartoon that depicted the religious figure naked, just days after the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, at the time said to result from anger over an amateur video that poorly depicted the Prophet. Last month, it released a drawing of the Virgin Mary that depicted her giving birth to Jesus. And on the day of the recent attack, minutes before the first reports of the killings began to circulate, Charlie Hebdo tweeted a cartoon of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, that jokingly wished him good health.

“A good issue of Charlie Hebdo is one that you open, one that frightens you when you see the cartoon, and then makes you laugh out loud,” the paper’s attorney, Richard Malka, added. “We won’t give in, otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense.”

The final decision Monday about the upcoming cover was an emotional one, Libération details: “Around 9:30 p.m., a small piece of paper makes the rounds, causing cries, laughs and cheers. The editor-in-chief Gérard Biard hugs Luz, who collapses. After hours marked by failed attempts, bouts of depression and writer’s block, the cover is approved. The Prophet is Charlie.”

Briard, the editor in chief, thanked new subscribers to Charlie Hebdo, specifically mentioning Arnold Schwarzenegger. “We thank all those who have subscribed, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, who on his own represents 10 subscribers,” he joked.

Wednesday’s issue will be released the same week that funerals for the victims are set to begin. French police continue to investigate the background of the two men identified as the Charlie Hebdo killers, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who were killed on Friday. And authorities are working to protect other other sensitive locations, specifically Jewish neighborhoods and schools, following Friday’s deadly attack on a kosher supermarket by Amedy Coulibaly, a man identified as a friend of the brothers.

Despite the complexities that went into putting together the issue, Malka, the lawyer, told The Telegraph, “It’s an act of life, of survival.”

—With reporting by Olivier Laurent and Sam Frizell

Read next: French Intelligence Warns That There Might Be Worse Attacks to Come

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The pair last spoke two months ago to discuss previous attacks

Their funeral will be attended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other dignitaries

The bodies of the four Jewish victims of last week’s terror attacks in France arrived in Israel on Tuesday, three days after they were killed in a standoff involving militant gunmen at a kosher supermarket in Paris.

The funeral for the four men — Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Francois-Michel Saada and Phillipe Braham — will be attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several other prominent individuals, the Associated Press reports.

A total of 17 people died over three days last week, when gunmen claiming allegiance to Jihadist group Al-Qaeda opened fire at the Paris headquarters of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Twelve people died in the initial attack, while the remaining victims — including the four laid to rest in Israel — were killed during the ensuing operation to apprehend the perpetrators.

[AP]

Not only does its president hate cartoonists, but a terror suspect passed through it to get to Syria last week

Prominent among the foreign leaders marching through downtown Paris on Sunday was Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, one more leader from a Muslim nation making a show of solidarity with the victims of Islamist extremism. In many ways it was a good fit: Turkey’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim, but its government is avowedly secular. The country was founded, in fact, on the principles of separation between church and state embedded in modern France, where its founding father studied. Turkey is also a member of NATO, and a long-standing applicant to the European Union.

But in other ways, the Turkish presence was incredibly awkward. Though the Paris march honored journalists killed in the attack on the monthly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Turkey currently has more reporters in jail, 40, than any other country, even Iran and China. And the country’s increasingly autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has a particular problem with editorial cartoons: He’s repeatedly sued Turkish cartoonists, claiming damages for being portrayed variously as a giraffe, a monkey, and an elephant. In 2011 the German ambassador to the country was summoned to the Foreign Ministry after a Berlin newspaper printed a panel showing Erdogan’s name on a doghouse.

But that wasn’t the only problem in Paris. It turns out that, mere days before Davutoglu traveled to France, a Parisian suspect in the terror attacks was making her way through Turkey. Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, said to be the accomplice of Amedy Coulibaly, who shot dead four people at a suburban kosher supermarket on Friday before police killed him, flew to Istanbul on Jan. 2. She was videotaped having her passport stamped at Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, and crossed into Syria on Thursday, Jan. 8. She may have been on her way to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS, the extremist group Coulibaly claimed as his own.

Turkish officials point out that Boumeddinene entered Turkey well before the Charlie Hebdo attack, and that no government flagged her until after she had entered Syria. Davutoglu noted his government has deported more than 1,500 individuals suspected of using Turkey as a corridor to Syria, and placed restrictions on 7,000 more. “We support every kind of intelligence not to accept foreign fighters,” he said at a joint news conference on Monday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Still, the episode pointed up the treacherous ambiguities that linger around Turkey’s involvement in Syria. Though keen to avoid involving its own armed forces in the civil war, Turkey has long encouraged rebel groups opposed to Syrian president Bashar Assad, allowing them to establish rear guard headquarters in Turkish border towns, and turning a blind eye to illicit crossings to carry the fight to the regime.

Ankara says it has tightened up since the rebellion has become dominated by Islamist extremists, but some critics question its resolve and, in any event, Boumeddinene’s experience demonstrates the practical challenges of enforcing any policy. And while Davutoglu was in Europe making nice, Erdogan was back in Ankara, preparing to lash out. “The West’s hypocrisy is obvious,” Erdogan said on Monday while receiving Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who had traveled to Turkey after attending the Paris march. “Games are being played with the Islamic world, we need to be aware of this.”

All of this, and more, shadows Turkey’s stubborn effort to join the European Union, an increasingly unlikely development as Erdogan clamps down on press freedom and tightens judicial controls. But then, as Davutoglu pointed out in Berlin, some 3 million Turks already reside in Germany, many descended from guest workers recruited in the 1960s to fill labor shortages. Their presence may well present challenge enough for Europe, given the continent’s limited success in integrating immigrant populations. Just as Davutoglu proved in Sunday’s march, Turks in Europe often make for an uneasy fit.

(PARIS) — Police believe as many as six terror-cell members may still be at large after the Paris attacks, one of whom has been spotted driving a car registered to the widow of one of the slain attackers.

Two French police officials told The Associated Press on Monday that authorities are searching the Paris area for the Mini Cooper car registered to the widow, Hayat Boumeddiene.

Turkish officials say she is now in Syria.

"We should have sent someone with a higher profile," Obama's top spokesman said