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Police Identify Man who Shot Policewoman; One of the Wanted Brothers Traveled to Yemen; Interview with Former Boston Police Commisioner

Aired January 09, 2015 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

FRED PLEITGEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And do you know the people who work there?

MICHAEL TOUITOU, FRENCH OFFICIAL: (SPEAKING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

ARIANNA: Yes, I regularly work with them. It's a printing company. I'm not quite sure who is involved in this. But I hope it's no one that I know.

PLEITGEN: How concerned are you for the safety of the residents here, your town and how this will unfold?

TOUITOU: (SPEAKING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

ARIANNA: It's very shocking and impressive and in my life it's the first time that I've seen something quite so big happening here in our city.

PLEITGEN: So as you can see, Chris, people here are very concerned about the situation, but it does appear to us as though the police here have the situation very much under control.

As you can see, we are as close to the scene as the police is going to get us. It's a little print shop, we hear. It's about 500 yards away from where we are this point in time. There's a big police cordon going on. We see a lot of police movement. You see a lot of police vans going past here.

But at this point in time, it seems as though the police have everything under control. One of the other things I want to tell you, Chris, is that the schools, of course, here are on lockdown at this point in time. And the people have been told to stay inside their buildings. There's one school that's actually right behind us. You're not going to be able to see it, because we can't pan there. But the students there have been opening the windows and saying, "Charlie, Charlie," in support, of course, of that satirical magazine that was hit by this awful terror attack. So they are actually inside there, being forced to stay inside there as this police operation unfolds here in this town.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Fred. Thank you very much.

We understand that many of the French resources are organized by colors, and we've heard from sources close to the investigation that colors are in place, meaning different colored vehicles, different colored uniforms that they need to give them all the different contingency assets that they needed are in place.

More word from the scene when you get it, Fred. Please come. And yes, there are reports about school kids being on lockdown now. That's part of the security in place. A couple of hundred kids, kindergarten, elementary school age are locked down in one school. That's just a few hundred yards from the building where the terrorists are holed up.

Now, we also have other reporting that is related to this. There was a shooting yesterday. It involved police officers, one of them a female officer. She lost her life. They have not apprehended the person who did that shooting, but there is information about them -- Jim.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The information is that the shooting that happened yesterday, they have not released the I.D. but they have identified who they believe to be the shooter, that he was tied to the two gunmen who took, who carried out the shooting here against "Charlie Hebdo," in the same cell in Paris. So that these two shootings are tied.

Listen, from the beginning, there looked to be some tie, because one happened a day right after the other. And in the second shooting that took place yesterday, the target was a police officer, a woman, who was killed in that attack.

CUOMO: Right.

JIM BITTERMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The guy who was identified -- might have been identified, was a member of what they call the Bout de Chemin group, which is a group of young people who played football together. They kind of grew up together The Bout de Chemin area is an area of Paris, an arrondissement. It's kind of a downtrodden area, and they may have been radicalized together.

CUOMO: It's interesting, because when you speak -- speak about the -- when you're talking to people who knew the preacher who apparently radicalized the two men behind the shooting here at "Charlie Hebdo," apparently, he used football, he used soccer as a recruiting tool. He would talk to them about the teams that they were passionate about. He would go out to the soccer fields. He would meet these young kids. That's the way he would establish the connection and then move them along the path to radical Islam.

HALA GORANI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Just one point here, according to the French press, they have very good police sources. They're saying -- they're quoting someone who's familiar with the investigation, saying as you both have mentioned, that the person who is responsible for the killing of that policewoman in Montrouge yesterday, was a friend or close associate. So this squares up with that. But also that two arrests have taken place among people who know -- who are close to that suspect identified in the shooting yesterday.

BITTERMAN: The family was contacted. GORANI: Right.

BITTERMAN: Certainly.

CUOMO: But the suspect, him or herself, has not been apprehended.

GORANI: Yes. No, not as far as we know.

CUOMO: And that' obviously a cause for concern for authorities. They have two suspects held up in one place. They have...

GORANI: I'm sorry, Chris, this is painting an entirely different picture.

CUOMO: Right.

GORANI: Here we have three gunmen, as well, with two potentially connected attacks.

CUOMO: Right.

GORANI: So it's starting to look more like...

CUOMO: And a cell of organization and an imam involved. I mean, it winds up moving farther and farther away from the traditional notion of lone wolf, you know, one person who is deranged or self- radicalized, and more to an organizational principle.

BITTERMAN: Except that the attack yesterday in Montrouge was really fairly random. I mean, this police officer...

CUOMO: It was at a checkpoint, yes?

BITTERMAN: It was a regular -- she was -- the police officer who was killed was just directing traffic around a traffic accident. And it looked like someone -- somebody had seized the opportunity, terrorists had seized the opportunity to shoot her.

GORANI: And was unarmed.

SCIUTTO: It does raise the question. We have all this attention focused on the two attackers who carried out "Charlie Hebdo." You have hundreds, thousands of police surrounding them. Where is the third attacker?

Now remember, there was a third suspect identified two days ago during the shooting.

BITTERMAN: Who drove the car.

SCIUTTO: The young man who apparently drove the car. He turned himself in, as you'll remember.

CUOMO: He says he didn't drive the car.

SCIUTTO: He says he didn't do it. He has friends, witnesses who say that they were with him.

So remember, there is some public question at least about who the third -- if there was a third assailant involved in this attack, who is that person and where is that person now?

CUOMO: It also winds up going to the heart of what terrorism is about, which is spreading fear. You don't know where these shooters are. You don't how big an organization it is. You don't know where it's coming from. Obviously, that makes the public very afraid.

Now, on the other side of that, the control of the main situation seems to be very strong. The elite SWAT team we keep talking to you about, they go by the acronym of GIGN. They are told to Jim and to us and by other sources, they are the best of the best. They are very effective. In 1994, they undertook a very delicate operation successfully. What was that?

SCIUTTO: This was to rescue hostages on an airliner in Marseilles, in a city in southern France. They carried it out successfully. I've been talking to Jim Reese, who you know well. He's a CNN analyst. He's also a former Delta Force commander in the U.S. He says that, from the U.S. perspective, the GIGN is tip-top quality in terms of counterterror: very well-trained, very capable. If you were going to pick a team, this is the team that you would want on this operation in France.

GORANI: Especially in hostage situations. Even domestic cases are handled by the GIGN. They wait, usually, hostages out. It happened even in a school hostage situation, about 15 years ago or so in west Paris.

So these are people who know how to negotiate with hostages, how to surround them, how to wait them out. And this could take, as you were mentioning earlier, Chris, a few hours, but it could also be much longer. Because you have to exhaust them, and you have to figure out a way to try to save, of course, the hostages.

SCIUTTO: And you're dealing with the worst kind of hostage-taker here, right: one who doesn't care, apparently, about his own life. Right?

CUOMO: Although that's going to be in question. Right? They had plenty of opportunities thus far to go out in a blaze of glory. They have not. They've been doing everything desperately, clumsily, to prolong their own lives up to this point.

SCIUTTO: True, although they have told police that they want to die as martyrs.

CUOMO: True.

SCIUTTO: But you're very right. They could be -- GIGN is very skilled at this. They could talk them out of it.

CUOMO: Right.

SCIUTTO: What does GIGN mean? Is there an easy translation?

BITTERMAN: There's not an easy translation, but there are actually two top terror -- anti-terrorist groups in France and that are called in on these kinds of things, GIGN and RAID.

GORANI: Right.

BITTERMAN: That's another one. Both of these are very, very well- qualified to handle the kind of situation.

As Hala mentioned, they're called in on all sorts of things.

CUOMO: Right.

BITTERMAN: I mean, domestic disputes, if there's a place where there's something -- someone is holed up with a shotgun, saying they're going to kill themselves, that kind of thing. They're almost on -- not a daily but probably a weekly basis, they're in action in the kind of situation where they've got to negotiate with someone and negotiate with someone. So I think they have a good track record at this.

CUOMO: Tricky situation. They are flooding assets right now into this area in northeast Paris. Where they believe they have the two main terror suspects from the "Charlie Hebdo" attack contained.

However, as you now have heard, there's at least one other gunman at large from this other shooting. So the French authorities have their hands full at this moment. Further details when we get them.

Back to you in New York, to Alisyn and Michaela.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: OK, Chris. Joining us now is Mike Rogers. Just a few weeks ago he was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He is now a CNN national security analyst. He is also a former FBI agent.

Mike, great to have you on board with us.

MIKE ROGERS, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

CAMEROTA: Now that we've learned that it's believed that one of these brothers traveled to Yemen, you think that this is highly significant.

ROGERS: I do. We knew that it's called AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and operated out of Yemen. For at least 18 months they've been talking about trying to find a way to have a western event for them. One of the things that they were concerned about is ISIS was getting all of the attention and the credit; and that takes away resources, it takes away recruits. And although they're not opposed to -- necessarily to ISIS directly, they wanted to make sure that they could put some points on the board, if you will, unfortunately.

So I think we're going to have to look very carefully at this next ring of this operation to try to determine was it directed from AQAP? Have they been sending out other teams to say when you get the opportunity, make these small but effective attacks.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: We -- we understand, Mike, that when they carjacked the victims -- these two men apparently carjacked a vehicle -- they told that carjacking victim, "Tell them we are al Qaeda."

So now it sounds as though they're boldly making proclamations.

ROGERS:

PEREIRA: And it seems so interesting, almost like some, you know, juvenile belt-measuring going on between ISIS and AQAP.

ROGERS: Yes. And when you see what's happening in Syria, the -- ISIS was affiliated with al Qaeda. Back in 2006, a guy named Baghdadi merged these two organizations, because they wanted to make sure that they had the status of al Qaeda.

But there was a fight about a year and a half ago or so, two years ago, maybe, where al Qaeda and what we now know as ISIS were struggling for decisional-making control. They wanted to go out, ISIS wanted to attack outside the borders of Syria. Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda, said, "No, I want you to attack inside the borders of Syria." That led to a rift of what you see the result of today. So they have a group called al Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate, is there, and it works against ISIS in many cases. They've -- sometimes they're shooting at each other. Sometimes they're working together. It's kind of an odd -- odd confluence of events here.

But this is what we were afraid of, is that they knew that they couldn't have a big-profile event. Would they be pushing for smaller, impactful events? And you can see by the sheer media attention this gets that they've had -- if, in fact, it proves to be an al Qaeda- directed event, this is, in their mind, a great way for recruits, for financing for other things.

CAMEROTA: Do U.S. authorities believe that one of these brothers, while in Yemen, met with Anwar al-Awlaki?

ROGERS: I had never seen anything when I was chairman that would indicate that they had directly had a meeting. He has been gone now for some time. I would be surprised if he actually met with Awlaki.

But remember, if you're going there as somebody that is not a senior, mid-level person, you're likely not going to meet with the leadership. You'll be put in a recruiting track. You'll be put in a radicalization track. They have some structure of organization to do that.

You might get some inspirational moments with those leaders -- in their mind, inspirational moments -- but this is -- wouldn't be a daily contact thing that they would have, while they're going through this training.

These are very compartmentalized for this very reason. Think about it. You went to -- likely met with someone from al Qaeda in Yemen and has been operating in France for some time. Even though they surveilled him, couldn't find enough. Now we see what the result was.

PEREIRA: So interesting to talk about that. The inspiration and the challenge that U.S. and European authorities now face. Because it's a changing foe, right? This is like a morphing organism. The threat has changed. We -- we secured borders. We put in place measures at our airports and continued to make sophisticated advances that way.

But now you're talking about a foe that's inspired these foreign fighters to scramble, essentially, and return to their homelands. And we're seeing this threat pop up in various nations around the world.

ROGERS: Yes, and we've seen quite a few arrests within the last eight months: Spain, Germany, France, Great Britain. United States, there was arrests here in New York...

PEREIRA: Recently.

ROGERS: ... a few months away, yes. And so when you look at what direction that ISIS gave to its followers, the Australian event, I think, really turned the corner here.

When they had about eight people who were ready to go, self- radicalized, raised their own money in Australia; said, "We want to come to Syria and join the fight." The ISIS recruiters, if you will, called back and said, "No, we want to you stay in Australia. We want to you randomly kidnap people off the street, cut their heads off, put it on video and send us the video." So that is a fundamental change, because we thought that they would be very eager to have them show up and get further radicalized and trained.

The other concerning part of that is they said, "We have plenty of people here in the fight." That's a problem. And so...

PEREIRA: It's a real problem.

ROGERS: ... after Australia you saw Ontario. You saw other incidents. You see even in France they had some other incidents in the days and weeks ahead of this event. This one, unfortunately, got through the net and was successful.

But you know, you have to worry, and law enforcement does worry, the sheer number of people that would fit the level of suspicion is probably more than they can handle.

CAMEROTA: Does the U.S. get involved in retaliation for this event in Paris? Does the U.S. launch any attacks in Yemen?

ROGERS: Well, my argument is if you can find and disrupt any of the al Qaeda elements operating, either their finance structure, their training structure, their recruiting structure, any pipeline they have for weapons, their leadership structure, we should do that, as a matter of course.

Remember, they want to attack the United States, as well. This happened in France. This could have easily happened in the United States, as well. And that's why we need to continue to keep the pressure up on their ability to plan and execute these types of operations.

CAMEROTA: Mike rogers, great to have you on NEW DAY.

ROGERS: Thank you so much.

CAMEROTA: Thanks so much for coming in.

We want to go back now to the scene in Paris, where Chris Cuomo is standing by -- Chris.

CUOMO: All right. Alisyn, thank you very much.

Let's get to Atika Shubert. She is closest to the action of what's going on right now as French authorities have the two main suspects surrounded in an industrial area northeast of Paris.

Atika, we hear word of reports that there are school kids who have been held in place. Now we hear they're being evacuated. What's the latest?

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. I'm in the town of Dammartin- en-Goele, and as you can see, the school behind me completely shuttered. We do know that there are still children inside. What they have done as a precaution is they've brought all the children, all the staff inside, and then individually parents are being asked to come and pick up their children, and then they're being escorted to safety. So they're trying to get children home safely. But they want to do so in the best possible way.

As you can see, it's eerily quiet here in this town. Most of the people are staying inside. And we were actually much closer to the scene. We're now less than a kilometer over there. We were about 500 meters away. Police were there. They were in the yards of the homes overlooking the industrial site, asking for everybody to close their windows, shut their -- you know, shutter their windows and doors, and just keep -- keep quiet and safe inside their homes.

So it's a very tense and eerie quiet in town. It's so quiet, in fact, that we can hear the planes taking off and landing at Charles de Galle Airport, which is quite nearby here.

So meanwhile, we're waiting to see what police tell us about what's going on inside the industrial site. At the moment, all seems quiet.

CUOMO: All right. Well, quiet is good. It's a small area, Atika, and also that means that there's no violence that is in any way at risk to those people there. So you let us know the latest from the ground.

Let's go to Christiane Amanpour. She's joining us from London. Of course, you've been here with me in Paris until very recently, Christiane. Please speak to what we're understanding now. If these men are indeed from AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and this kind of -- this sick competition between terror groups for notoriety.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, clearly, they have been quoted as saying twice, "Tell the media that we are al Qaeda in Yemen." And now with all this reporting that CNN has done, the justice minister, what she told me last night, it's clear that at least one, maybe two of them have been to Yemen sometime in the last several years.

And you just heard Mike Rogers, as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, talking about the threat, the new threat, which is also what the French foreign minister told me.

These are not foreigners, like 9/11 who came abroad -- from abroad and attacked inside a different country. These are what intelligence and security officials are really afraid of as this current wave of terrorists. They are the home-grown ones. The once who are told, "No, don't come over here and don't attack in Iraq or Syria or wherever. Stay in your own homes. Stay in your own countries and create as much mayhem as possible."

And indeed, if they did go to Yemen, you remember that several years ago, before he was killed, Anwar al-Awlaki, the sort of inspiration certainly for the underwear bomber, he already back at that time, had targeted cartoonists. There was an American cartoonist back then who had urged be killed in response for cartoons that that cartoonist had drawn. So there is a little bit of a link there.

Then the other issue is whether the two incidents in Paris are linked. The one that we reported on yesterday morning, which a policewoman was killed, and these two Kouachi brothers. Well, the foreign minister has told me that, in fact, they don't know yet fully whether they're linked. But it could be some kind of mimicry. When something like this happens, such a huge situation, there are all other kind of wannabes who want to do that.

And here in England, of course, Chris, you can imagine, working with the French, working with the European colleagues, they're also in a very high state of alert.

CUOMO: Well, the coalition getting tighter, obviously, because this threat could be in any of these major areas that we're dealing with here, obviously.

Now our reporting here on the ground, Christiane, is that they do believe that there is a connection, that it's a cell connection between the shooting of that unarmed policewoman yesterday. She lost her life. Although that suspect is still at large. And of course, that feeds into, really, the great paranoia, right? That you have living among you individuals who are organizing in the cause of terrorism against their own population.

AMANPOUR: Exactly. And as I say, over the last several months this has been the predominant fear. You heard even months ago, firm officials in the United States say that they were afraid that they would get a blow-back from what happened in Syria and Iraq, the rise of ISIS.

And now, yes, we're talking about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but it is the same kind of thing. It's the same kind of agenda, the same kind of attack mode. So that is what they're very afraid of.

They're afraid of that here. And Laurent Fabius (ph) said to me, "Look, you know, there are so many of them." They name about 1,000 suspects in France who have gone over there and who are potentially, you know, trouble when they come back. And they say that, "Look, we've tried. We have stopped several attack plans over the last 18 months. This one got through. And by the way, we are simply waiting for maybe another one to happen." They say, "We cannot rule out that this is the last big one to happen here."

And that's what all these countries are worried about right now, as they continue to sort of watch for this home-grown, inspired by these groups, whether it's al Qaeda, whether it's ISIS, whatever it might be, to commit this kind of terror in western Europe and in the west.

CUOMO: Is there anything unique to the situation in Paris that we're dealing with? The threat that you're articulating right now is well- known, or at least it's well-feared in most western democracies. That being that you have ISIS calling out to lone wolves, which could mean anything from the depraved to the mentally ill, to the disenfranchised.

And now you have AQAP that seems to have had the ability, at least in this current situation, to organize, at least loosely, a cell that has hatched two different killings in two different days. And the question becomes -- is there something unique about what the French authorities are doing to combat terrorism that makes them particularly susceptible to this?

AMANPOUR: Well, the French have always said that they are unique and they have had a very, very, very much higher level of alert, because they have a much bigger Muslim population. Now by that, it does not mean to say the Muslim population of France are all about to commit this kind of thing. Obviously, that's not the case.

But they do have a very high percentage, the highest percentage of Muslims in western Europe. And they have what we've been reporting about these cities, these sort of -- not inner suburb slums, but outer city slums, where so many of these people are sort of, you know, committed, with no hope, no future, no nothing. And a lot of the sort of activity and the dangerous activity over the past few years has come from there. So they have been on a much higher threshold of fear than many others in western Europe. So that's one thing.

The other thing that is different, is that this is a -- the first time that in the west, they have deliberately attacked the press and the freedom of speech and tried to intimidate and put their marker and tried to govern what free societies talk about and write about and draw about. So that, according to the foreign minister, is a dangerous new trend, as well.

CUOMO: And of course, what they're seeing here now in Paris, when we've been talking to local officials, the deputy mayor for one, this is the worst kind of wakeup call. It's the worst kind of social evolution or devolution, depending on how you want to look at it, where the French people have to wake up to the reality that they do need to have tighter controls on who moves and how they move and what is surveilled. And you know, that's the kind of thing that this situation winds up making everybody open their eyes to. And it's a horrible reality to have to face. But they're facing it right now.

As we get more details -- thank you, Christiane -- we'll come back to you for perspective. We'll stay here for reporting when we have it. But right now let's get to New York and Alisyn and Michaela.

CAMEROTA: OK, Chris. We want to bring in Ed Davis right now. He was the commissioner of the Boston Police Department at the time of the manhunt for the marathon bombing suspects.

Mr. Davis, thanks for joining us again. So once again, here is a town that we're watching on lockdown. As police try to capture two radicalized brothers. This may -- must seem to you eerily similar to what happened in Boston.

ED DAVIS, FORMER COMMISSIONER OF BOSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT: It really is, Alisyn. We've been having flashbacks here over the last few hours to what we went through 18 months ago. And it really is shocking.

You've got two brothers. We had one of the brothers here travel to a Islamic, radical Islamic area of Dagestan, where they may have received some type of training.

In this case, one of the brothers has gone to Yemen to work with AQAP.

You have a well-planned attack and an escape that was very effective. But then both, both groups, both here in Boston and in Paris, became almost disoriented, disorganized. They started to do things that weren't consistent with a well-planned incident. Almost as if they expected to die in the initial attack.

And then there was the pursuit and the arrest, I mean, the robbery at the gas station, which is very similar to what happened in Cambridge here.

So now they're holed up in a warehouse. In our particular case, because the helicopters were up and forced one of the suspects to hide in a boat, the same dynamic has occurred. That they now have them locked down.

You know, there's also the fog of war that occurs in these situations, and the studies that happened after Boston have pointed to the confusion that erupts around a chaotic situation like this. You almost can't believe anything you first hear, and unless you see it with your own eyes, you can't confirm things.

So we spent a lot of time sending investigators and people with the -- with the leadership team out to the scene to give us valid information from the scene. That's why the helicopter was so important to be able to see exactly what's happening on the ground. And I can see that the weather conditions there are making that a very difficult proposition.

CAMEROTA: You make a good point about all of the confusion any time there's a breaking news situation. We got this bulletin from the French interior ministry that they cannot confirm that there is a hostage in there with the terrorists. That doesn't mean that there is not a hostage, just that the French interior ministry is not willing to confirm it yet. So of course, there is the fog of the unfolding event and just how to deal with it and how do police deal with it when it's impossible to get real information?

DAVIS: Well, the good thing is that they have people right on the scene. They have the best information coming into that command post right now.

So they have a perimeter of special weapons experts that are around the outside, that are giving them minute-by-minute updates of what they're seeing.

They've got an overhead view of what's happening.

And they're also working really hard on plans for the inside of the building, what it looks like. And developing as much internal information as possible.

And at the same time, their intelligence analysts are doing complete rundowns on the two suspects. They know a lot about them. They've had a couple of days to get that information. But that will be a continuing process.

France is also very good at collecting electronic information. Surveillance of telephones is very common, much more common there than it is in the United States. So we don't know what they have in their archives, what they've stored. And I'm sure all of that information is being pored through right now to get a better perspective on the psychology of these individuals.

CAMEROTA: Mr. Davis, we appreciate you sticking around throughout all of NEW DAY this morning, helping us understand what's going on on the ground. We will check back in with you.

But right now we want to get back to Paris, outside the headquarters of "Charlie Hebdo" where we find Chris Cuomo reporting for us -- Chris.

CUOMO: All right, Alisyn. If you're just joining us now, let us tell you how we got to where we are right now.

On your screen, you're going to see the current situation. The two terror suspects from the massacre here at the offices of "Charlie Hebdo" have been contained and confined by police to an industrial area northeast of Paris. They are believed to have one hostage with them. It is a female. They have said they refuse to surrender the female.

How do authorities know? They are dialoguing, if not negotiating with them. They've also been told by the suspects they are willing to die as martyrs. You have to balance that against the fact that, so far these two men have done everything they can not to die, everything they can to keep themselves alive.

But the authorities are there.

Let's take a couple of steps back to how we got to where we are right now. Yesterday you'll remember, obviously, the horrible massacre here. They escaped in a car. They encountered three different sets of police. Two patrols, one police person on foot. They wound up killing that policeman. He wound up being a Muslim, by the way, and they executed him very intentionally and deliberately.

They then took off outside the city. They were pursued. There wound up being surveillance in the sky, helicopters, made contact with the suspects. The suspects became aware. They abandoned their vehicle. They took to foot into a wooded area north of Paris. That area was searched. Obviously, the suspects were not found or engaged at that time.

Night fell. They used night vision for surrounding fields. The men were able to exist over the night. Authorities are saying, on the plus side, that means that they are tired. They have been exposed. They are probably hungry.

But somehow this morning, they wound up commandeering a vehicle. Now, when they did that, there were conversations had at that time that we're going to report more in detail that gives an understanding of who these men are and what their motivation is.

They were then pursued by police into the area where they are right now.

Here's what authorities have done. They brought in their best, the GIGN. They are an elite SWAT team. They are actually a military unit. They are very experienced in these areas. And even by U.S. intel standards, they are the best of the best.

They have sealed them into that area. They then created circles of containment that led to points of egress, exits have been blocked. The mandate from French authorities, from the president himself, is that the two men cannot be allowed to leave this area.

So by French authorities' standards, this ends here. When is another question. Time, the authorities say, could be long but is on their side because of fatigue wearing on the suspects.

The surrounding town has been shut down.