What we know about the Paris supermarket hostage-taker, accomplice

WATCH: Two angles from the assault on a kosher supermarket in Paris as authorities stormed the building killing the hostage taker.

PARIS – A police official says the man who has taken at least five people hostage in a kosher market on the eastern edges of Paris Friday appears linked to the Charlie Hebdo newsroom massacre earlier this week that left 12 people dead.

Paris police released a photo of Amedy Coulibaly, 32, as a suspect in the killing Thursday of a female police officer, and the official–who was not authorized to speak about the situation–named him as the man holed up in the market. He said the man is armed with an automatic rifle and some hostages have been gravely wounded.

The official said a second suspect, a woman named Hayet Boumeddiene, is the gunman’s accomplice. The Guardian reports Boumeddiene is Coulibaly’s 26-year-old live-in partner, who told police in 2010 she and Coulibaly had practiced firing crossbows during a visit to radical Islamist Djamel Beghal in Murat, France.

The official said Coulibaly opened fire in the kosher market, near Paris’ Porte de Vincennes, and declared: “You know who I am.” The attack came before sundown when the market would have been crowded with shoppers.

Helmeted SWAT squads converged on the standoff. The French president ordered the country’s top security official to the scene, an official with the president’s office told The Associated Press.

Police said 100 students are under lockdown in schools near the market.

Coulibaly’s record includes convictions for armed robbery in 2001, according to The Guardian.  French media reported Coulibaly had been radicalized in prison, after which he started drug-dealing and served another sentence.

The Guardian reports Coulibaly was arrested in relation to a plot to free Islamist Smain Ait Ali Belkacem from jail in 2010–which Kouachi and his brother Said were also named in. Belkacem, a member of the Algerian Islamic Armed Group (GIA) was jailed for life in 2002 for a 1995 Paris metro station bombing that injured 30 people. The brothers were not prosecuted because of lack of evidence, but a search of Coulibaly’s home uncovered Kalashnikov ammunition which led to a prison sentence that ended just over a year ago, reports The Guardian.

READ MORE: What we know about the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo Paris shooting

The two Kouachi brothers suspected in Wednesday’s attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were on the run after gunning down 12 people and were cornered by police about 30 kilometres away from the supermarket on Friday.

France has been high alert for other attacks since the newspaper massacre.

With files from Global News