Staff at the Avia service stop in Villers Cotterets in the Aisne region reported seeing rocket propelled grenades and assault rifles in the back of the Kouachis' stolen grey Renault Clio as they were forced to fill its tank at gunpoint at about 10.30am (9.30am GMT).
One resident said it appeared that police believed the men may have fled into the nearby Foret de Retz - a vast woodland measuring 13,000 hectares. A homeowner, who like hundreds of other residents had been ordered by police to stay inside and lock all doors, said: "The police arrived at 5pm and ordered us to stay indoors, lock up and close the shutters. I'm a bundle of nerves."
The potential endgame to the Charlie Hebdo shooting came after France suffered a second day of terrorist bloodshed as it entered three days of national mourning for the atrocity which left eight journalists dead at the satirical weekly, including its editor, and two police officers.
A female police officer suffered fatal injuries when a gunman, wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with a pistol and an automatic weapon, opened fire on her and a colleague in Montrouge, a southern suburb of Paris, shortly before 9am (8am GMT) before fleeing on foot. The dead officer was named as Clarissa Jean-Philippe.
The French authorities said the shooting was being treated as a "terrorist act" but no formal link had been identified with the Charlie Hebdo killings. The second officer was seriously injured. Two people were tonight being held in connection with the incident.
The suspected copycat attack occurred as France came to a standstill to observe a minute's silence at midday and the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris tolled in memory of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo killing.
The lights on the Eiffel Tower were dimmed and flags were flown at half-mast across the country as politicians praised the spirit of defiance which saw 100,000 people take to the streets of French cities on Wednesday night to reject the actions of the attackers with the message "Je Suis Charlie".
But as the spirit of unity flourished, so too did the first signs of a backlash against France's Muslim population, the largest in Europe, after at least five serious attacks aimed at mosques and businesses. Dummy grenades were thrown at a mosque overnight in Le Mans, western France, and a Muslim family were shot at in the car in the Vaucluse region of southern France.
The Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that the "real France" was in the dignity and defiance of the demonstrations not in these scattered acts of anti-Muslim violence.
French gendarme guard a gas station where the suspects of a shooting at a Paris newspaper office were reportedly spotted in Villers Cotterets, 80 kilometers northeast of Paris. Photo / AP
"This is a time when the nation should be saying 'no' to sweeping statements, 'no' to intolerance, 'no' to hatred and 'no' to the kind of comments which traumatise the country," Mr Valls told RTL radio.
"France is more than (the novelist) Michel Houellebecq," he said - a reference book published on the day of the Charlie Henbdo shootings in which Houellebecq speculates about a Muslim-run France in 2022.
A map showing the location of Villers-Cotterets, where the suspected gunmen were said to have robbed a petrol station before evading police again.
The lawyer for Charlie Hebdo, known for its lampooning of radical Islam and the subject of previous attacks by extremists including a firebombing in 2011, said that its next edition would go ahead on 14 January. Rather than its usual print run of 40,000 copies it will produce one million. The former Mayor of Paris, Betrand Delanie, urged people to buy a copy as a gesture of defiance. Other French newspapers promised to help the decimated Charlie Hebdo staff produce the magazine.
After a night in which the trail of the Cherif, 32, and 34-year-old Said appeared to have gone cold despite a number of raids in the eastern city of Reims where one of the men lived, the manhunt recommenced in a dramatic manner after the brothers pulled off the RN2 road from Paris to Soissons to steal food and petrol from the Avia filling station.
The manager reported seeing a formidable arsenal in the rear of the Clio, which was hijacked from its driver in north east Paris after the men abandoned their initial getaway vehicle - a Citroen C3 used to flee from the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
Reports that the Clio was then seen heading back in the direction of Paris led to a flurry of activity in the capital as police vehicles were stationed at the northern entrances to Paris to monitor traffic entering the city.
Prime Minister Valls told RTL radio early this morning the two men were known to intelligence services and the fear that they could carry out another attack "is our main concern".
The murder of nine journalists, two police officers and a maintenance man by masked men has shocked France. Around 11.30am two men forcibly entered the offices of the satirical magazine, where a weekly editorial meeting was taking place, and after compelling the journalists to identify themselves opened fire. They were late seen fleeing the building.
French President François Hollande called the massacre "an act of exceptional barbarism," as British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Barack Obama also condemned the actions of the attackers.
