It was a day of mourning and defiance, of brave words and choking sadness. In Israel, four Jews, killed in Paris on Friday, were buried; a militant claiming allegiance to the Islamic State had seized them as hostages at a kosher supermarket on the final day of a three-day rampage by extremists. In Paris, three coffins draped in the French tricolor banner were laid out at the central police station as a solemn-faced President François Hollande led tributes to the officers who had perished, reports The New York Times.
“They died so that we may live in freedom,” Mr. Hollande said. The pallbearers stepped to Chopin’s funeral march under a chill and sullen sky. Even when faced with attack, Mr. Hollande said, “our great and beautiful France does not bend, it remains upright.”
“I assure you,” he told the families of the three officers, “that all of France shares your pain.”
As France and Israel buried the victims, the authorities intensified efforts to find associates of the extremist gunmen.
On Tuesday, the authorities in Bulgaria confirmed that they had arrested a French citizen who was believed to have links to Chérif Kouachi, one of the brothers accused in the attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.
The Frenchman, Fritz-Joly Joachin, has been held in Haskovo, Bulgaria, since January 1st, nearly a week before the attacks, on a European warrant issued after his wife accused him of abducting their 3-year-old son in France.
The French authorities issued a second warrant on Sunday, charging him with “participation in an organized criminal group for the preparation of terrorist acts,” said Pavel Jekov, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor’s office in Haskovo, near the Turkish border.
Read more of this report from The New York Times.
See also:
How the Paris terrorists slipped off intelligence radar
Charlie Hebdo killings: did intelligence services overlook threat from terror network?
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