Charlie Hebdo shooting: France mourns as gunmen continue to elude manhunt

• Paris terror attack: how the day unfolded
• Muslim leaders condemn Paris attack
• Massive manhunt amid fears of more attacks
• 'I'm not going to shoot you because you're a woman': shooter spares women

Paris: The manhunt for the Charlie Hebdo attackers has stretched into a new day in France, as police scoured a large forest north of Paris for signs of the killers.

On Thursday the French government mobilised 80,000 police and soldiers across the country to protect public buildings and join the hunt, one of the biggest in the nation's history, as the nation mourned the loss of 12 people who died in the attack.

People hold a vigil at the Place de la Republique for victims of of the terrorist attackCredit: Getty Images

They also guarded the main roads into Paris, amid fears the still-armed terrorists might head back to the capital to commit new atrocities.

The national day of mourning was marred by some violence – with reports of attacks on mosques, and the deadly shooting of a policewoman in southern Paris, which authorities said was unconnected to the Hebdo massacre.

A man holds up a giant pencil during a gathering in Tarbes, southern France, in tribute to the 12 people killed by two gunmen at the editorial office of Charlie HebdoCredit: AFP

The Hebdo killers had initially evaded police on Wednesday by abandoning their car. However an ID card they left behind led police to name them as Cherif Kouachi, 32, and his 34-year-old brother, Said.

Police said the two were "armed and dangerous".

They held up a petrol station on Thursday morning, taking petrol and food, but the manager recognised them and called police, and anti-terrorist officers swooped on the area near Villers-Cotterets, north-east of Paris.

Officers conducted door-to-door searches of nearby towns and scoured farms and woodland using night-vision equipment and dogs after the gunmen's new stolen car was found abandoned nearby.

French police stand in the street in Longpont, northern FranceCredit: AFP

According to one report they even scoured a large cave for the brothers.

After hours of unsuccessful search into Thursday night some units returned to Paris and five helicopters joined the hunt.

A combination of images taken in Paris on January 8, 2015 shows the illuminated Eiffel tower and the Eiffel tower plunged into darkness as a demonstration in tribute to the twelve people killed. Credit: AFP

French officials said 11 people had been taken into custody in connection with the attack, including the Kouachi brothers' 18-year-old brother in law, and more than 90 witnesses had been interviewed.

It has emerged that the brothers, Paris-born of Algerian descent, both had links to al-Qaeda.

Chérif Kouachi had spent 18 months in prison from 2008 for recruiting Islamist fighters for al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq – the predecessor of ISIS.

And the other brother, Said, was believed to have trained with al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen in 2011.

Both were on US terrorist watch lists – and French authorities came under pressure to explain how they had not been under closer surveillance.

French media reported that Cherif had been a member of the so-called Buttes Chaumont network, based in a northern Paris neighbourhood: petty criminals, usually Muslim, who had been radicalised by Islamic preachers to fight against US forces in Iraq.

He was arrested in 2005 while attempting to travel to Damascus, and sentenced for "preparing to commit acts of terrorism".

Thursday was a national day of mourning in France for the 12 who died during the attack.

Bells tolled across Paris from the towers of Notre Dame after a minute's silence at midday, and traumatised Parisians left improvised shrines made of candles, flowers, posters and pens at the police roadblocks surrounding the Hebdo offices.

In the evening the lights on the Eiffel Tower were symbolically extinguished to honour the dead.

On Thursday morning, in the south Paris suburb of Montrouge a man wearing a flakjacket and armed with an assault weapon shot a policewoman. The attack also left a streetsweeper injured. The policewoman later died of her injuries.

However Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, said that there was no known link to the Hebdo attack.

"The succession of these two extremely violent dramas aimed at press freedom and the police must be met with dignity and general condemnation," he said.

Fears of reprisals grew among France's large Muslim community after reports of attacks on mosques in the 24 hours after the Hebdo attack.

"Everybody is looking at us as if we did it," one Muslim told the BBC in the Parisian suburb where one of the attackers lived.

Thursday saw a series of top-level government meetings in response to the attack on Hebdo, including one between President Francois Hollande and his predecessor and opposition leader Nicholas Sarkozy.

Mr Sarkozy said the attack on Hebdo had been "an attack by fanatics committed against civilisation".

"The responsibility of a civilisation is to defend itself and that is what we have decided to do," he said.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen announced that she would campaign for a referendum on the death penalty in response to the massacre.

"France is under attack, our culture, our freedoms, our values, our way of life," she said.

Meanwhile, grief-stricken staff of Charlie Hebdo vowed that their magazine would come out again next week – with a million copies to be put on sale.