Paris police have arrested 12 people suspected of providing “logistical support” to the gunmen in last week’s terror attacks that claimed the lives of 17 victims, the prosecutor's office said Friday, reports FRANCE 24.
Searches were also being carried out in several other towns in the Ile-de-France region, a police source told Reuters, as part of the investigation into three days of terror attacks in the French capital that began with the January 7th shootings at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Several of the night’s arrests took place in the Montrouge area in the south of the capital – the same part of the city where a policewoman was shot dead by Islamic extremist Amedy Coulibaly on Thursday – as well as in the suburbs of Fleury-Mérogis and Grigny south of the capital, where Coulibaly grew up.
Coulibaly was killed in a hostage siege at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris on Friday, in which he killed four of his captives, and was an associate of Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo attack.
The arrests came as police in Belgium carried out raids across the country on members of a suspected Islamist terror cell. Two suspected militants were killed during a shootout with police.
Authorities in Belgium say there is no evidence yet to link the cell to last week’s attacks in Paris, but earlier Thursday investigators said they suspected a Belgian man could have supplied the weapons used by Coulibaly.
The man, named as Neetin Karasular, handed himself in to police on Tuesday, saying he had been in contact with Coulibaly in recent months.
Investigators are still poring over the complex chain of events that led to three French nationals perpetrating the worst attacks on French soil for decades, which have left the country and much of the international community in shock.