France is deploying 10,000 security personnel – including almost 5,000 police officers at Jewish schools – as it steps up the search for a likely accomplice to the attackers who killed 17 people last week.
The deployment is to guard what are seen as potentially vulnerable locations, said the defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian. France’s 717 Jewish schools are to be given police protection in the wake of the hostage-taking at a Jewish supermarket on Friday, in which four captives were killed.
The announcement came as the prime minister, Manuel Valls, said on Monday that Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed the four people a day after shooting dead a policewoman in southern Paris, probably received help from someone else. Valls said the search for any co-conspirator was urgent because “the threat is still present” even after the attacks.
Coulibaly was killed on Friday afternoon as police stormed the supermarket. This happened shortly after brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who killed 12 people on Wednesday when they attacked the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were themselves shot dead by police ending a siege at a printing firm outside the French capital.
Valls did not identify the suspected accomplice. However, Turkey’s foreign minister said on Monday that Hayat Boumeddienne, the partner of Coulibaly, who is being sought by police in connection with the supermarket siege, had crossed into Syria from Turkey on Thursday.
Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu told Turkey’s Anadolu news agency that Boumeddienne arrived in Turkey from Madrid on 2 January, before any of the attacks, and stayed at a hotel in Istanbul. He said Turkish authorities established she crossed into Syria on Thursday, the day Coulibaly shot dead Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a 27-year-old newly-trained policewoman.
The French president, François Hollande, is to chair a national security crisis meeting later on Monday, including Valls and Cazeneuve, as well as the heads of police and the security services. Cazeneuve has promised to particularly protect Jewish institutions, telling parents of a Jewish school to the south of Paris that soldiers would also be posted as reinforcements.
The security measures follow the release of a video in which Coulibaly pledged his allegiance to Islamic State, while nonetheless saying he had collaborated with the Kouachi brothers, who said during their attacks they were allied to al-Qaida, a bitter opponent of Islamic State.
Coulibaly said he had worked with Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, calling them the “brothers from our team”, and had helped them financially. “We did things a bit together and a bit apart, so that it’d have more impact,” he said in the video, which also saw featured weapons and ammunition.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, said on Monday that he will travel to Paris later this week for talks on countering extremist violence. The move follows criticism of the Obama administration for not sending anyone senior to Sunday’s vast rally for unity in Paris.
The march gathered anything from 1.5 million to 2 million people on the streets of the French capital, and was the biggest crowd there since the city was liberated in August 1944. An estimated 3.7 million took to the streets across the whole country.
Many marchers carried pens, pencils and placards with slogans like “Nous sommes la République” (We are the Republic) and “Je suis Muslim”. Others carried French flags and chanted, “On est tous Charlie” (We are all Charlie).
At the head of the march were the families and friends of the victims of last week’s attacks, followed by a group of around 50 world leaders walking arm in arm, including Hollande, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, David Cameron and the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
In one profoundly emotional scene, Hollande hugged Patrick Pelloux, an A&E doctor who is also a journalist at Charlie Hebdo. Pelloux arrived late at the magazine office on Wednesday to find many of his colleagues had been slaughtered. He and other survivors have vowed to publish Charlie Hebdo next Wednesday despite the attack, with a record print run of 1 million copies.
