(Image source from: Attack on media in Paris)

A police officer was wounded in a shootout in southern Paris on Thursday, reported Reuters. It is unclear at this stage, whether there was any link to the killings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine. Television station iTELE reported that two police officers were lying on the ground after the attack.

An attack on media for alleged cartoon on Islam was caused huge protest in Paris. Yesterday the 7th January 2015, Paris had witnessed the worst ever terror attack in the last 50 years. The entire world has condemned this outrageous act against the media house. Thousands of people congregated  at Republique Square near the site of the shooting to honour the victims, waving pens and papers reading "Je suis Charlie" - "I am Charlie." Similar rallies were held in London's Trafalgar Square as well as Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and Brussels.

"They knew exactly what they had to do and exactly where to shoot. While one kept watch and checked that the traffic was good for them, the other one delivered the final coup de grace," said the witness. Le Bechec, the witness who encountered the gunmen in another part of Paris, described on his Facebook page seeing two men "get out of a bullet-ridden car with a rocket-launcher in hand, eject an old guy from his car and calmly say hi to the public, saying 'you can tell the media that it's al-Qaida in Yemen."

In a sombre address to the nation Wednesday night, French President Francois Hollande said, "Let us unite, and we will win," he said. "Vive la France!" "Nothing can divide us, nothing should separate us. Freedom will always be stronger than barbarity," said the president, calling for "national unity."

The incident happen in the office of Charlie Hebdo which gained notoriety in February 2006 when it reprinted cartoons of the Prophet that had originally appeared in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. Its offices were fire-bombed in November 2011, when it published a cartoon of Mohammed under the title "Sharia Hebdo". They were dragged to court under anti-racism laws, but did not stop the publication, which in September 2012 again drew the Prophet, this time naked.

Editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb was among those killed. Other victims included Jean Cabut, known across France as Cabu, Georges Wolinski and Bernard Verlhac, better known as Tignous.

France's media erupted in fury at the massacre of their colleagues, with the daily Liberation running the headline 'We are all Charlie" -- a line repeated in many other papers and echoed online with the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie. Business daily Les Echos urged people to face up to "barbarism", publishing the last cartoon written by one of those killed in the attack. "The hooded bastards declared war on France, on our democracy, on our values," the paper said in an editorial.

US President Barack Obama condemned and called the attack a "cowardly, evil" assault. Pope Francis stated it as a "horrible attack", "whatever the motivation, is abominable, it is never justified". The imam of the Drancy mosque in the northern suburbs of Paris, Hassen Chalghoumi, addressed the shooters as "barbarians". "They want terror, they want fear. We must not give in. I hope the French will come out in solidarity and not against the Muslim minority in Europe," he told AFP.

Outraged France was in mourning on Thursday, for the cartoonist who were killed yesterday. The security forces are desperately hunting for  two brothers suspected of gunning down 12 people in a terror attack on a satirical weekly. Even after  24 hours after the brazen daylight assault, the masked, black-clad gunmen are still on the loose.

One of the suspects, Cherif Kouachi, had a history of funnelling jihadi fighters to Iraq and a terrorism conviction from 2008. He and his brother, are to be considered "armed and dangerous," French police said in a bulletin on Thursday. A third man, Mourad Hamyd, 18, has surrendered at a police station in a small town in the eastern region after seeing that his name is linked to the attacks in the news and social media, stated Paris prosecutor's spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre.

The French suspect, in a deadly attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium had returned after fighting alongside with the extremists in Syria. The man who rampaged in the south of France in 2012, killing three soldiers and four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse, received paramilitary training in Pakistan. Terrors are always having a link to Pakistan. The terror training by Pakistan army and ISI is just a cottage industry.

It is too late to name and list Pakistan as a rogue state which is dangerous for the humanity. One side the aids from America for fighting terror is being used for the training of terrorists and cry in front of the world as they are victims of terror. Once sanctions are being imposed on Pakistan, the world can see a drastic reduction in terror activities. India is a victim of Pakistan sponsored terrorism. The world has to unite to put an end to terrorism and that can happen only when Pakistan is declared as a terror hub.

By Premji