PARIS — As many as six members of a terrorist cell involved in the Paris attacks may still be at large, including a man who was seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen, French police said Monday.
The disclosure came as France deployed 10,000 troops to protect sensitive sites — including Jewish schools and neighborhoods — in the wake of the attacks that killed 17 people last week.
Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi and their friend, Amedy Coulibaly, were killed Friday by police after a murderous spree at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. The three all claimed ties to Islamic extremists in the Middle East.
Two police officials told The Associated Press that authorities were searching the Paris area for the Mini Cooper registered to Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s widow. Turkish officials say she is in Syria.
One of the police officials said the cell consisted of about 10 members, and that “five or six could still be at large,” but he did not provide their names. The other official said the cell was made up of about eight people and included Boumeddiene.
One of the other men believed to be part of the cell has been seen driving Boumeddiene’s car around Paris in recent days, the two officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation with the media. They cautioned that it was not clear whether the driver was an operative, involved in logistics or had some other, less-violent role in the cell.
An Interior Ministry official declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, and a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office was not immediately available for comment.
One of the police officials also said Coulibaly apparently set off a car bomb Thursday in the town of Villejuif, but no one was injured. It did not receive significant media attention at the time.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the manhunt is urgent because “the threat is still present” from the attacks.
“The work on these attacks, on these terrorist and barbaric acts continues … because we consider that there are most probably some possible accomplices,” Valls said.
The nationwide deployment of troops would be completed by Tuesday and would focus on the most sensitive locations, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said.
By midday Monday, soldiers and police filled Paris’ Marais district — one of the country’s oldest Jewish neighborhoods. About 4,700 of the security forces would be assigned to protect France’s 717 Jewish schools, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
“A little girl was telling me earlier that she wanted to live in peace and learn in peace in her school,” Cazeneuve said on a visit to a Paris Jewish classroom, where the walls were covered with children’s drawings of smiling faces.
“That’s what the government, that’s what the Republic, owes to all the children in France: security in all schools, especially in the schools that could be threatened,” he added.
The children listened and waved Israeli and French flags.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the kosher market. Volunteers, meanwhile, recited prayers over the bodies of some victims as they were prepared for burial by the Jewish Burial Society in Paris.
The attacks began Wednesday with 12 people killed at the publication Charlie Hebdo.
