Brothers of hate: the path that led Charlie Hebdo shooters to jihad

The younger brother was a ladies' man who belted out rap lyrics before the words of a radical preacher persuaded him to book a flight to Syria to wage holy war.

Less is known about his elder sibling, whose ID card was found in the getaway car used by the gunmen in Wednesday's Paris attack. But US officials said both were on the US no-fly list and the older brother had travelled to Yemen, where he met the late al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, according to a senior Yemeni intelligence source.

The Kouachi brothers - 32-year-old Cherif and 34-year-old Said, 34 - are the targets of a huge manhunt after the precision attack that killed 12 people at Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly that lampooned radical Muslims and the Prophet Mohammed. Witnesses said the gunmen claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda's offshoot in Yemen.

Both Kouachi brothers - the Paris-born children of Algerian parents - were already known to American and French counterterrorism authorities.

Cherif, a former pizza deliveryman, had appeared in a 2005 French television documentary on Islamic extremism and was sentenced to 18 months' jail in 2008 for trying to join fighters battling in Iraq.

It was the teachings of a firebrand Muslim preacher that put him on the path to jihad in his rough-and-tumble neighbourhood of northeastern Paris, Kouachi said in the documentary.