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Paris gunmen are brothers: police

French police say they have identified three men as suspects in the deadly attack in Paris.

They are named as brothers Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, both French nationals in their early 30s, and 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality is unclear.

One of the officials said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network.

A witness of Wednesday's shootings at the offices of weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo said one of the attackers told onlookers, "You can tell the media that it's al-Qaeda in Yemen."

No arrests have been confirmed in the hunt for the attackers.

Masked gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which caricatured the Prophet Mohammed, methodically killing 12 people, including the editor, before escaping in a car. It was France's deadliest terrorist attack in half a century.

Cherif Kouachi was convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

During Cherif Kouachi's 2008 trial, he told the court, "I really believed in the idea" of fighting the US-led coalition in Iraq. He said he was motivated by his outrage at television images of torture of Iraqi inmates at the US prison at Abu Ghraib.

Shouting "Allahu akbar!" as they fired, the men also spoke fluent, unaccented French in the military-style noon-time attack on Charlie Hebdo, located near Paris' Bastille monument.