French forces kill newspaper attack suspects, hostages die in second siege

Two brothers suspected of attacking the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were killed when police stormed their hideout on Friday while their hostage was freed, a police official said.

However, a police source said at least four other hostages had been killed at a separate siege at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris.

The two brothers died when security forces moved in on a print works in the small town of Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris, where the chief suspects in Wednesday's attack had been holed up with their hostage.

A police source said the hostage-taker at the Jewish supermarket, who is believed to have had links to the same Islamist group as the brothers, had also been killed.

The print works at Dammartin-en-Goele, set in marsh and woodland, had been under siege since the gunmen abandoned a high-speed car chase and took refuge there early on Friday.

Charlie Hebdo had long courted controversy with satirical attacks on Islam as well as other religions and political leaders. A witness said one of the gunmen in Wednesday's attack was heard to shout: "We have killed Charlie Hebdo! We have avenged the Prophet!"

The gunmen killed 12 people in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo weekly, which raised questions about surveillance of radicals, far-right politics, religion and censorship in a land struggling to integrate part of its five-million Muslim population, the EU's largest.

Security sources said the French-born brothers of Algerian origin had been under surveillance and had been placed on European and US "no-fly" lists.