Suspects In Charlie Hebdo Massacre Killed By Police

With explosions and gunfire, French security forces ended a three-day terror rampage around Paris, killing the two al-Qaida-linked brothers who staged a murderous rampage at a satirical newspaper as well as an associate who seized a kosher supermarket to try to help them escape.

It was the worst terror spree France has seen in decades. At least seven people were killed Friday - the three terrorists and at least four hostages - just days after 12 people were massacred in the newspaper attack Wednesday. Sixteen hostages were freed Friday, one from the printing plant where the two brothers were holed up and 15 others from the Paris grocery store.

The fate of a fourth suspect - the wife of the supermarket attacker - remained unclear and Paris shut down a famed Jewish neighborhood amid fears that a wider terror cell might launch further attacks. France's interior minister warned his shaken nation to remain "extremely vigilant."

The four attackers had ties to each other and to terrorism that reached back years and extended from Paris to al-Qaida in Yemen. They epitomized Western authorities' greatest fear: Islamic radicals who trained abroad and came home to stage attacks.

Said and Cherif Kouachi, the brothers who attacked the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly, came out with their guns blazing Friday evening after an all-day hostage siege at a printing plant northeast of Paris, a French police official said. They were killed and their hostage was freed, authorities said.

An accomplice, Amedi Coulibaly, took hostages Friday afternoon at a kosher grocery in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood in Paris - then died in a nearly simultaneous raid there, said Gael Fabiano of the UNSA police union. Coulibaly had threatened to kill his five hostages if French authorities launched an assault on the two brothers, a police official said.