January 2015 Île-de-France attacks

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Île-de-France attacks
hostage crisis
Weapons
Deaths20 total:
  • 8 employees, 2 police officers, and 2 others at Charlie Hebdo shooting
  • 1 police officer at Montrouge shooting
  • 2 gunmen at Dammartin-en-Goële hostage crisis
  • 4 hostages and 1 gunman at Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege
Injured22 total:
  • 11 people at Charlie Hebdo shooting
  • 1 civilian at Fontenay-aux-Roses shooting
  • 1 bystander at Montrouge shooting
  • 6 hostages and 3 police officers at the Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege
PerpetratorsSaïd and Chérif Kouachi, Amedy Coulibaly

From 7 to 9 January 2015,

ISIS
before he died.

On December 16, 2020, 14 people who were accomplices to both the Jewish supermarket attack and the Charlie Hebdo shooting, including Coulibaly's former partner Hayat Boumeddiene, were convicted.[9] However, three of these accomplices, including Boumeddiene, were not yet captured and were tried in absentia.[9]

Attack events summary

The attacks began on 7 January, when two gunmen

took hostages on January 9 at a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes.[10]
French armed forces and police conducted simultaneous raids in Dammartin and Porte de Vincennes, killing all three attackers. After 12 January 2015 and for an indefinite period, as part of
Operation Sentinelle
, nearly 10,500 military personnel were deployed in France to secure 830 sensitive places (school, churches, press organizations, etc ).

At the time, the attacks comprised the deadliest act of

terrorism in France since the 1961 Vitry-Le-François train bombing by the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), which was working against Algerian independence.[11] These fatalities were surpassed ten months later by the November 2015 Paris attacks
.

Background

In December 2014, three attacks occurred in a span of three days in France.

The first attack occurred in Joué-lès-Tours, in which a knife-wielding man attacked a police station, injuring three officers before being killed.[12] The second attack occurred in Dijon, in which a man used a vehicle to run over eleven pedestrians in several areas of the city before being arrested.[13] The third attack occurred in Nantes, in which a vehicular attack at a Christmas market resulted in ten people being injured and one fatality. The driver was arrested after attempting suicide.[14]

Although the French government concluded that the attacks were not related to each other, it heightened the nation's security and deployed 300 soldiers to patrol the nation's streets.[15]

Attacks

Charlie Hebdo shooting

The first and deadliest of the attacks occurred at 11:30

National Day of Mourning
was held in France on 8 January.

Fontenay-aux-Roses and Montrouge shootings

A few hours after the Charlie Hebdo attack, a 32-year-old man who was out jogging in Fontenay-aux-Roses was shot and wounded.[20] The man suffered injuries to his arm and back and as of 11 January was in critical condition. Shell casings found at the scene were later linked to the weapon carried by Amedy Coulibaly at the Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket hostage crisis on January 9.[21] However, the jogger refuted Coulibaly's involvement and recognized Amar Ramdani, a friend of Coulibaly, as the gunman.[22]

On 8 January, Coulibaly shot and killed municipal police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe at the junction of Avenue Pierre Brossolette and Avenue de la Paix in Montrouge (a suburb of Paris), and critically wounded a street sweeper. As police continued their search for Charlie Hebdo suspects, they initially dismissed the idea that there could be a link between this shooting and the Charlie Hebdo killings, but later confirmed they were in fact connected.[17]

Coulibaly reportedly was heard to declare allegiance to

al-Hayat Media Center claimed responsibility for Coulibaly in a jihad nasheed video named "Ma vengeance" celebrating the posterior November 2015 attacks.[24]

Dammartin-en-Goële hostage crisis

On 9 January, the assailants of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, went to the office of Création Tendance Découverte, a signage production company on an industrial estate in Dammartin-en-Goële. Inside the building were owner Michel Catalano and a male employee, 26-year-old graphics designer Lilian Lepère. During the siege, Catalano told Lepère to hide inside the refectory. Throughout the crisis, the perpetrators were unaware that Lepère was in the building. During the siege, a salesman named Didier went to the building on business, and Catalano left his office, where he had been hiding. Both were confronted by the perpetrators and asked to leave. Didier realized that they were terrorists and quickly alerted the authorities.

Catalano returned to the building and helped one of the perpetrators who had been injured in earlier gunfire. He was allowed to leave after an hour. After this, Lepère, who was hiding in a cardboard box, was able to alert authorities of the situation via text message.[19] The siege ended after nine hours at 16:30 after a combined force of French Armed Forces and police stormed the building and killed both Kouachi brothers, the assailants.[25]

Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege