'Most wanted' woman in France still at large
The last member of the terror cell that carried out the dual attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish grocery store is still on the run. Hayat Boumeddiene, the 26 year old wife of Amedy Coulibaly, the man who carried out the grocery store attack, is wanted in connection with the terror attacks as well as the shooting of a policewoman.
Political and security chiefs were reviewing how two French-born brothers of Algerian extraction could have carried out the Charlie Hebdo attacks despite having been on surveillance and "no-fly" lists for many years. They said before they were killed they had been acting on behalf of al Qaeda in Yemen.
Paris chief prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters late Friday the three attackers had had a large arsenal of weapons and had set up booby traps. He said they had a loaded M82 rocket launcher, two Kalashnikov machine guns and two automatic pistols on them.
The whereabouts of the partner of the Jewish deli attacker, 26-year-old Hayat Boumeddiene, remained unknown. Police listed her as a suspect in that strike and an earlier shooting of a policewoman, describing her as "armed and dangerous".
An official police photograph shows a young woman with long dark hair hitched back over her ears. French media, however, released photos purporting to be of a fully-veiled Boumeddiene, posing with a cross-bow, in what they said was a 2010 training session in the mountainous Cantal region.
Le Monde daily said Boumeddiene wed Amedy Coulibaly in a religious ceremony not formally recognized by French civil authorities in 2009 and was questioned by police over suspicions of links to militant Islamists in 2010.
With one of the gunmen saying shortly before his death that he was funded by al Qaeda, Hollande warned that the danger to France - home to the European Union's biggest communities of both Muslims and Jews - was not over yet.
A gathering of European leaders to discuss the terror threat is set for Sunday in Paris. Needless to say, security is very tight as the authorities have brought in an extra 500 officers.
But for ordinary Frenchmen, things will never be the same:
"It's no longer like before," said Maria Pinto, on a street in central Paris. "You work a whole life through and because of these madmen, you leave your house to go shopping, go to work, and you don't know if you'll come home."
Sounds like a win for the jihadists to me.