France steps up accomplices hunt in Paris attacks probe

France has ordered 10,000 troops on to the streets to protect sensitive sites - half of them to guard Jewish schools – as it hunts for accomplices to the Islamic militants who left 17 people dead as they terrorised the nation.

Prime minister Manuel Valls said the search is urgent because “the threat is still present” after the attacks that began on Wednesday with a massacre at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and ended when three attackers were killed on Friday in two near-simultaneous clashes with security forces around Paris.

Defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the deployment will be fully in place by Tuesday and will focus on the most sensitive locations.

French police later said that they believe as many as six terror-cell members may still be at large after the Paris attacks, one of whom has been spotted driving a car registered to the widow of one of the dead attackers.

Two police officials said that authorities are searching the Paris area for the Mini Cooper car registered to the widow of Amedy Coulibaly, Hayat Boumeddiene.

Turkish officials say she is now in Syria.

By midday, Paris’s Marais – one of the country’s oldest Jewish neighbourhoods as well as a major tourist site – was filled with police and soldiers.

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve also said 4,700 security forces would be assigned to protect France’s 717 Jewish schools.

“The work on these attacks, on these terrorist and barbaric acts continues ... because we consider that there are most probably some possible accomplices,” Mr Valls told BFM television.

Video emerged on Sunday of Coulibaly explaining how the attacks in Paris would unfold. French police want to find the person or persons who shot and posted the video, which was edited after the attacks that ended with Coulibaly being killed.

Boumeddiene herself was seen travelling through Turkey with a male companion before reportedly arriving in Syria with him on January 8 – the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack and the same day Coulibaly began his murderous spree by shooting dead a Paris policewoman.

Security camera video footage shown today by Turkey’s Haberturk Television network showed Boumeddiene arriving at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport on January 2 – five days before the first terror attack in Paris. A high ranking Turkish official confirmed that the woman on the video was Boumeddiene.

Turkish intelligence tracked Boumeddiene from her arrival.

Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the state-run Anadolu Agency that Boumeddiene stayed at a hotel in Istanbul with another person before crossing into Syria on Thursday.

She and her travelling companion, a 23-year-old man, toured Istanbul, then left on January 4 for a town near the Turkish border, according to a Turkish intelligence official.

Her last phone signal was on January 8 from the border town of Akcakale, where she crossed over apparently into Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria, the official said. Their January 9 return plane tickets to Madrid went unused.

Survivors say the Charlie Hebdo attackers, two brothers from Paris, claimed they were being supported by al Qaida in Yemen, the group the US considers the most dangerous offshoot of that network. In his video and in comments to French news media before he died, Coulibaly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, which has taken over large sections of Iraq and Syria.

Ties among the three attackers date back to at least 2005, when Coulibaly and Charlie Hebdo attacker Cherif Kouachi, 32, were jailed together. It later emerged that Cherif’s older brother, 34-year-old Said, the other Charlie Hebdo gunman, fought with or was trained by al Qaida in Yemen.

Cherif Kouachi was also convicted in 2008 along with several others of belonging to a network that sent jihadis to fight American forces in Iraq.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu today visited the Paris kosher grocery where four of the hostages were killed, and volunteers recited prayers over the bodies of some victims as they were prepared for burial by the Jewish Burial Society in Paris.