Yemen's al-Qaeda claims responsibility for Paris attack

Yemen's al-Qaeda branch today claimed responsibility for last week's massacre at a Paris satirical newspaper, with one of its top commanders saying the assault was in revenge for the weekly's publications of controversial cartoons.
The claim came in a video posting by Nasr al-Ansi, a top commander of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which appeared on the group's Twitter account.
The video was the group's official claim of the assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices, although a member of AQAP, as the branch is known, last Friday first confirmed to The Associated Press that the branch had carried out the attack.

In the 11-minute video, al-Ansi says the Charlie Hebdo attack, which killed 12 people, including editors, cartoonists and journalists, as well as two police officers was in "revenge for the prophet."
He said AQAP, as the branch is known, "chose the target, laid out the plan and financed the operation" against the weekly, though he produced no evidence to support the claim.
Orders, he said, came from al-Qaeda's top leader Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's successor.

The attack on the weekly was the beginning of three days of terror in France that saw 17 people killed before the three Islamic extremist attackers were gunned down by security forces.

Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi who carried out the attack on the paper were "heroes," al-Ansi said.
"Congratulations to you, the Nation of Islam, for this revenge that has soothed our pain," said al-Ansi.
"Congratulations to you for these brave men have blown off the dust of disgrace and lit the torch of glory in the darkness of defeat and agony."
In the video, al-Ansi made no claim to the subsequent Paris attack on a kosher grocery store, during which a friend of Kouachis, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a French policewoman Thursday and four hostages on Friday.
Coulibaly appeared in a video message two days after his death, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group, a fierce rival to al-Qaeda, saying he had worked in coordination with the Kouachis, the "brothers from our team."

The Coulibaly video raised questions over possible cooperation between the rival groups, competing for resources, recruits and leadership of Jihad. But al-Ansi called the rival groups' attacks a "coincidence.