The French police from France’s prestigious Raid and GIGN forces are in the third day of their huge manhunt for the two suspected gunmen in the deadly attack that killed 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo magazine. The two men on the run – Paris-born Algerians Said and Cherif Kouachi – are reportedly fundamental islamists who were angered by the satirical publication’s depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

Search operations are concentrated around the rural area of Picardy where the two men, wearing masks, reportedly robbed a gas station at Villers-Cotterets, 50 miles north-east of Paris on Thursday. The owner of the gas station said that they were heavily armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They were driving a grey Renault Clio, the same car that they had stolen in Paris after their attack. Police are also going door-to-door in the nearby village of Crépy-en-Valois while helicopters are monitoring the situation in the hopes of finding the two gunmen, aged 32 and 30 years.

The two suspects are Said and Cherif Kouachi, brothers and militant islamists.

The car they abandoned in Paris had ten Molotov cocktails inside and two flags used by jihadists, showing the level of their extremism.

18-year-old Murad Hamid, Cherif Kouachi’s brother-in-law, surrendered himself to Paris authorities and is believed to have been an accessory to the crime. He surrendered after seeing his name being associated with the incident on social media sites. Various internet users believe that Mr. Hamid is innocent as he was at school at the time of the crime with a twitter hashtag #MuradHamidinnocent purporting that the young man was not connected to the executions.

32-year-old Cherif Kouachi has been known to the Counter-Terrorist Squad since 2008 when he had participated in a mission in Iraq. Born in Paris n 1982, he is a member of the “Network of Buttes-Chaumont”. The young man was born to Algerian parents who both died when the young boy was young so that he and his brother grew up in an orphanage.

A U.S. official said on Thursday that the younger of the Paris terror suspects had traveled to the home base of al-Qaeda’s most active terror cell in Yemen, raising the prospect that he had formal training or direction.

The Council of Paris has called for an extraordinary meeting where Charlie Hebdo will be made an honorary citizen of the city. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said that the move was an effort to “give strength, to comfort and to say that these values which were represented by Charlie Hebdo are an integral part of our values.”

Charlie Hebdo lawyer Richard Malka said that next week’s edition of the magazine will go ahead on Wednesday with one million copies instead of the usual 60,000 editions.