Heavily armed SWAT teams moved into Porte de Vincennes after the hostage situation developed at a kosher grocery, involving a black gunman and at least one hostage, police said.
The Paris Public Prosecutor’s office confirmed the standoff had been connected to another hostage situation that had occurred at the same time outside Paris, where police shot dead two gunmen suspected in Wednesday’s Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Police told ABC News that a suspect in the Thursday fatal shooting of a police officer in Paris’ Monrouge area, identified as Amedi Coulibaly, 32, was believed to have been involved with the grocery standoff.
Police issued a wanted poster for both Coulibaly and another female suspect named Hayat Boumeddinene earlier in the killing of the policewoman. Police also gave more details about the attack, saying Coulibaly wore body armor when he allegedly killed the officer.
Coulibaly had met with Nicolas Sarkozy. He worked at a Coca-Cola plant in his hometown.
He and nine other people like him visited the President of the Republic in 2009, who wanted to meet companies engaged in favor of the employment of young blacks.
Sarkozy was not really very popular with black and Arab youths. But “the encounter in real life, it is impressive. Like it or not, it’s still the president,” Coulibaly said then.
The other hostage situation ended in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele outside of Paris. The two men, identified by police as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, were holed up in a printing company in a town northeast of Paris, taking one male employee hostage, before they were shot dead by police.
Both had been on a US No Fly List ‘for years,’ a US official said. According to different revelations, one of the suspects trained with Al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen.
French-born sons of Algerian parents, they were both logged in the US government’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) system, a database on known or suspected international terrorists, US counterterrorism sources said on condition of anonymity. TIDE contains over one million names.
The casualty situation in Vincennes is still not clear. There have been reports of at least four hostages killed, but they have not been confirmed by French authorities. Other sources spoke of four “critically wounded”.