The prime suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack earlier this week, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, died in a barrage of bullets after an eight hour standoff in the Paris suburb of Dammartin-en-Goelle on Friday according to French authorities.

As the two brothers exited the warehouse northeast of Paris and opened fire with high-powered assault rifles, police who had the building surrounded, replied with gunfire themselves and cut down the brothers. The one hostage that the two had taken and held, was unharmed.

Just prior to the eruption of gunfire, French police were in contact with the two gunmen. According to police reports, the two gunmen told police they were prepared to die as Martyrs.

Police were alerted to the two gunmen after they emerged from the forest where they had been hiding and high-jacked a vehicle driven by a woman. She survived the high-jacking, and would later tell a schoolteacher that stopped for her about the incident. The teacher reported the incident to authorities and police were soon in close pursuit. Because of roadblocks set in place by the police, the two gunmen took shelter in a warehouse in Dammartin-en-Goelle.

Over 88,000 french police and security forces have been searching for the two suspects since their Wednesday attack on the satirical newspaper, where they killed ten people in the newspapers offices, as well as two police officers as they made their getaway.

At the same time as the shoot-out in Dammartin, police stormed a kosher supermarket in Paris, where another gunman and a possible accomplice, had taken over the store and taken five hostages. After hours in a stand-off, police entered the building and shot and killed 32-year-old Amedy Coulibaly. Three of the five hostages in that incident lost their lives in the exchange. Paris authorities beleive that the gunman, Coulibaly, had ties to the two brothers killed in Dammartin at about the same time.

French authorities believe that his alleged accomplice, Hayat Boumaddiene, escaped with others from the store in the confusion.

Boumaddiene is known to have shared a home with Coulibaly since 2010. Police are still seeking her whereabouts.

  charlie hebdo, gunmen, killed, paris, stand-off