Two suspects in Paris magazine shooting spotted in north France

Heavily armed police and security forces have descended on a small town in northern France where the two brothers suspected of the Charlie Hedbo attack robbed a service station and took off back towards Paris.

The manager of a petrol station near Villers-Cotteret in the northern Aisne region "recognised the two men suspected of having participated in the attack", the source told AFP.

Brothers Sherif and Said Kouachi are suspected of slaughtering 12 people during a rampage at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo yesterday.

French newspaper La Parisien reports the two suspects robbed the service station, about an hour's drive north of Paris, at around 10.30am local time (8.30pm AEDT).

Shots were reportedly fired during the robbery, and the suspects were carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and what appeared to be a rocket launcher.

They abandoned a grey Skoda car on the site, which has been seized by police for examination.

The men then drove off in the direction of Paris in a white Renault Clio with covered-up number plates.

RAID, the anti-terrorist unit of the French police force, and the GIGN, a paramilitary special operations unit, have been deployed to Villers-Cotterets.

Eighteen-year-old suspect Hamyd Mourad reportedly handed himself in to police after learning he was wanted but the Kouachi brothers have been on the run since the shootings.

One French security official who declined to be named warned that "there will be a showdown" with the men who are heavily armed.

The Kouachi brothers are believed to be the orphans of Algerian immigrants who grew in Rennes, in France's northwest, French newspaper Liberation reports.

The paper describes Cherif Kouachi as an "occasional Muslim" who worked as a sports instructor before he became radicalised by the US invasion of Iraq and highly-publicised images of human rights abuses at Abu Gharib prison.

In 2005 Cherif was arrested with another French national for planning to fly to Iraq to take part in the war against US forces.

He was sentenced to three years jail in 2008, including a suspended sentence of 18 months.

The brothers are alleged to have links to a Yemeni terrorist network and are believed to have returned to France from Syria in the last year.

A witness to yesterday's attack told reporters that one of the attackers had said "you can tell the media it's al-Qaeda in Yemen".

With AFP