Spotlight: Shooters dead, danger to France not over yet

French President Francois Hollande told his people on Friday that high vigilance is still necessary as danger to the country is not over yet despite the death of three shooters who committed the deadliest attacks in the country in 50 years.

Hollande called on his countrymen to stand in unity in face of racism and anti-semitism in a national address after the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly were neutralized on Friday.

"I call for unity. It's our best arm, we must show determination to face all what could divide us," Hollande said.

Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, perpetrators of Wednesday's Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, were killed Friday afternoon around 16:55 local time (1555 GMT) in an assault by a French security force.

Xinhua reporters at the scene heard intensive gunshots, followed by explosions and heavy white smoke billowing out of the printing factory in Dammartin-en-Goele, northeast of Paris, where the Kouachi brothers had been hiding since Friday morning.

At a press conference Friday night, Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins confirmed that the Kouachi brothers, heavily armed, came out of the printing factory and fired on the security force before they were neutralized.

Two workers of the factory were held hostage. One of them was quickly freed by the Kouachis, who didn't notice the existence of a third man in the building.

The third man, hiding himself under the sink in the canteen on the second floor of the building, kept giving information to the security force through his mobile phone, which helped the smooth carrying out of the assault, said Molins.

Meanwhile, another police operation was carried out almost at the same time at the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood of Paris, where Coulibaly, who shot dead a policewoman at Montrouge on the southern edge of Paris on Thursday, took several hostages in a Jewish supermarket at about 13:55 local time (1255 GMT).

In a video released by officials, a French security force broke into the kosher supermarket, freed the hostages and neutralized Coulibaly.

Unfortunately, four hostages were killed at the very beginning of the hostage-taking, but the rest of them were safely evacuated.

According to local BFMTV, the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly were acting together.

Connected by BFMTV on Friday morning, Cherif Kouachi said he was commissioned by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Coulibaly, who actually called BFMTV himself, said he belonged to the Islamic State (IS) and that he acted synchronically with the Kouachi brothers.

"They, Charlie Hebdo, I, the police," he was quoted by BFMTV as saying.

With one person injured in Wednesday's Charlie Hebdo attack still in very critical condition, 17 French lost their lives in the past three days. Endi