Elite French police have stormed a printworks and a Jewish supermarket, killing two brothers wanted for the Charlie Hebdo attack and a gunman linked to them in a dramatic end to twin sieges that rocked France.
As shots and explosions rang out in Paris on Friday evening, five people, including the gunman, were found dead in the aftermath of the assault on the Jewish store in eastern Paris and fifteen captives were freed, security sources said.
The four people killed at the supermarket were 'likely' killed by the gunman at the start of the hostage-taking, the prosecutor leading the investigation said.
Pointing to the 'state of the bodies' and gunman Amedy Coulibaly's own remarks in an French television interview from the scene, prosecutor Francois Molins said it seemed 'no hostage was killed during the assault' by police that ended the siege.
A further four people were in critical condition after the raid, as ambulances raced to the scene, joining a jam of police vans, other emergency vehicles and helicopters buzzing overhead.
There were reports a second gunman had escaped.
President Francois Hollande has warned that France 'faced down' Islamists behind the deaths of 17 people in three days 'but has not finished with the threats'.
In a televised speech on Friday delivered shortly after commandos killed the three gunmen responsible, Hollande said that 'even if France knows it faced down' the attackers and had 'courageous' security personnel, the danger had not passed.
'I call for vigilance, unity and a mobilisation,' he said.
The dramatic climax to the two standoffs brought to an end more than 48 hours of fear and uncertainty that began when the two brothers slaughtered 12 people at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the bloodiest attack on French soil in half a century.
The weekly had lampooned jihadists and repeatedly published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed which angered many Muslims.
About 30km to the northeast of Paris, in the small town of Dammartin-en-Goele, the two Islamist Charlie Hebdo gunmen staged a desperate escape bid, charging out of the building all guns blazing at the security forces before being cut down, a security source said.
Police confirmed their identity as Cherif and Said Kouachi, French-born orphans of Algerian origin.
The other hostage-taker in the eastern Porte de Vincennes area of Paris was also suspected of gunning down a policewoman in southern Paris Thursday and knew at least one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen.
French police released mugshots of the man, Amedy Coulibaly, 32, as well as a woman named as 26-year-old Hayat Boumeddiene, also wanted over the shooting of the policewoman.
In Dammartin-en-Goele, only 12km from Paris's main Charles de Gaulle airport, French elite forces had deployed snipers on roofs and helicopters buzzed low over the small printing business where the Charlie Hebdo suspects had been cornered early Friday.
Ahead of the stand-off, police had already exchanged fire with the pair in a high-speed car chase.
One witness described coming face-to-face at the printer's with one of the suspects, dressed in black, wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying what looked like a Kalashnikov.
The salesman told France Info radio that one of the brothers said: 'Leave, we don't kill civilians anyhow.'
Prior to the standoff, the suspects had hijacked a car from a woman who said she recognised the brothers.
As fears spread in the wake of the attack, the head of Britain's domestic spy agency MI5 warned that Islamist militants were planning other 'mass casualty attacks against the West' and that intelligence services may be powerless to stop them.
And as a politically divided and crisis-hit France sought to pull together in the wake of the tragedy, the head of the country's Muslim community -- the largest in Europe -- urged imams to condemn terrorism at Friday prayers.
France is gearing up for a 'Republican march' on Sunday expected to draw hundreds of thousands including British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced that a total of 88,000 security forces were mobilised across the country and that an international meeting on terrorism would take place in Paris on Sunday.
Nine people had already been detained as part of the operation, Cazeneuve said.
Meanwhile, questions mounted as to how a pair well-known for jihadist views could have slipped through the net and attack Charlie Hebdo.
Cherif Kouachi, 32, was a known jihadist convicted in 2008 for involvement in a network sending fighters to Iraq.
Said, 34, has been 'formally identified' as the main attacker in Wednesday's bloodbath.
A senior US administration official told AFP that one of the two brothers was believed to have trained with al-Qaeda in Yemen, while another source said that the pair had been on a US terror watch list 'for years' and were barred from flying into the US.
Al-Qaeda in Yemen has claimed responsibility for the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
A member of the Yemen branch says the group directed the attack against the French satirical magazine in Paris 'as revenge for the honour' of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
The member has provided a statement to The Associated Press in English saying 'the leadership of AQAP directed the operations and they have chosen their target carefully'.
He says the attack was in line with warnings from the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the West about 'the consequences of the persistence in the blasphemy against Muslim sanctities'.
He said the group delayed its declaration of responsibility for 'security reasons.'
He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the group's regulations.