Je Suis Charlie

On Wednesday morning, a black Citreon C3 drove up to a building in Rue Nicolas-Appert. Two gunmen, donned in all black and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, got out of the car and entered the building.

After bursting into No. 6 the men realised they had got the wrong target. They moved further down the street to No. 10, the Charlie Hebdo offices. The men advanced inside where upon asking maintenance staff the location of the offices, shot caretaker Frederic Boisseau.

Corinne Rey, one of the magazine’s cartoonists, was forced to enter the code for the keypad entry to the newsroom on the second floor. Here a weekly editorial meeting was taking place. After asking for the paper’s editor Stephane Charbonnier, they opened fire, killing the editor and police bodyguard Franck Brinsolaro. Seven other journalists and a guest were also shot dead.

Police arrived at the scene as the gunmen were leaving. A police car blocked the gunmen’s escape and so the gunmen opened fire. After getting past this car, the gunmen headed south before doubling back on the northern carriageway. Here they stopped the car and video footage shows the gunmen get out of the car and shoot police officer Ahmed Merabet. One of the men then walked up to Merabet and shot him dead at close range.

The gunmen abandoned their car and shortly before midday today police lost track of them. Paris has been put on maximum alert with an extra 500 police deployed on the streets of the capital.

Twelve people were killed in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices: eight journalists, two police officers, a caretaker and a visitor.

From left: Economist Bernard Maris, cartoonists Georges Wolinski, Jean "Cabu" Cabut, Stephane "Charb" Charbonnier, Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac and Philippe Honore and Michel Renaud.

·        

     Charlie Hebdo editor and cartoonist Stephane "Charb" Charbonnier, 47, who had been living under police protection since receiving death threats

Cartoonists Jean "Cabu" Cabut, 76, Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac, 57, Georges Wolinski, 80, and Philippe Honore, 73

·         Economist and regular magazine columnist Bernard Maris, 68, known to readers as Uncle Bernar

·         Mustapha Ourrad, proof-reader

·         Elsa Cayat, psychoanalyst and columnist, the only woman killed

·         Michel Renaud, who was visiting from the city of Clermont-Ferrand

·         Frederic Boisseau, 42, caretaker, who was in the reception area at the time of the attack

·         Police officers Franck Brinsolaro, who acted as Charb's bodyguard, and Ahmed Merabet, 42, who was shot dead while on the ground

·         BBC Special Correspondent Fergal Keane has filed a report from the banlieue, or suburb, where one of the Charlie Hebdo gunman lived.

·         He says that for many in France, the word banlieue is "often loaded with negative association".

·         "In the minds of some French, these estates can be breeding grounds for radicalism," he adds.

·         "France is outraged but not yet polarised between Muslims and the rest. That isn't to underestimate the potential for a much wider crisis.

·         "Muslim elders say the key to tackling the problem is breaking the power of radical Islam among the alienated young."

• Al-Qaeda group 'praises attack'

Al-Qaeda's branch in North Africa has praised the attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo, according to an organisation which monitors jihadi activity.

Site Intelligence Group said that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had also issued a reminder that Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda's founder, had threatened those who mocked the Prophet Muhammad

Arab ambassadors in Paris have denounced the Charlie Hebdo attack as a "barbaric terrorist act" and assured that their countries were engaged in the fight against terrorism.

In a press statement they said "the member countries of the Arab League are engaged, alongside other members of the international community in the struggle against terrorism, intolerance and extremism".

The two main suspects in the Islamist attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris are said to have robbed a service station in the north of France.

They stole food and petrol, firing shots as they struck at the roadside stop near Villers-Cotterets in the Aisne region, French media report.

The gunmen have now been named as Said and Cherif Kouachi. French media say Cherif, 32, was jailed in 2008 and had long been known to police for militant Islamist activities.

Cherif, who also went by the name Abu Issen, was part of the "Buttes-Chaumont network" that helped send would-be jihadists to fight for al-Qaeda in Iraq after the US-UK invasion in 2003.

He had grown up in an orphanage in Rennes, north-west France, and had trained as a fitness coach before joining his brother in Paris, Liberation newspaper reports. In the capital he worked as a pizza delivery man.

Police detained him in 2005 just as he was about to board a plane for Syria - at the time the gateway for jihadists hoping to fight US troops in Iraq.

n 2008 he was jailed for three years, for his role in sending militants to Iraq, but 18 months of the sentence was suspended, Liberation reports.

The brothers had allegedly frequented a mosque in the Stalingrad district of Paris, where they came under the influence of a radical imam called Farid Benyettou. He reportedly encouraged them to study Islam at his home and at a Muslim centre in their neighbourhood.

A key figure in the Buttes-Chaumont network was Boubaker al-Hakim, a militant linked to al-Qaeda resistance against US forces in Iraq, a French expert on Islamists says.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, an expert at Sciences-Po University in Paris, says a French court jailed Hakim for seven years in 2008, at the same time as Cherif, along with Farid Benyettou, who got six years. That action broke up the jihadist network they had created.

In 2010 Cherif Kouachi was named in connection with a plot to spring another Islamist, Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, from jail. Belkacem used to be in the outlawed Algerian Islamic Armed Group (GIA) and was jailed for life in 2002 for a Paris metro station bombing in 1995 which injured 30 people.

At 7pm tonight, the Eiffel Tower went dark as a sign of mourning for the twelve victims.