DUBAI Al Qaeda in Yemen has claimed responsibility for the attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, saying it was ordered by the Islamist militant group's leadership for insults to the Prophet Mohammad, according to a video posted on YouTube. 
 
 Gunmen killed 17 people in three days of violence that began when they shot staff in Charlie Hebdo's offices last week in revenge for the publication of satirical images of the Prophet. 
 
 One Western source said no hard evidence of a direct operational link to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had yet been found. 
 
 But it was the first time that a group had officially claimed responsibility for the attack, which was led by Cherif and Said Kouachi, two French-born brothers of Algerian extraction who had visited Yemen in 2011. 
 
 In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman said the United States believed the video was authentic but officials were still determining if the claim of responsibility is true. 
 
 "As for the blessed Battle of Paris, we...claim responsibility for this operation as vengeance for the Messenger of God," Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi, an AQAP ideologue, said in the recording. 
 
 Ansi said the "one who chose the target, laid the plan and financed the operation is the leadership of the organization", without naming an individual. 
 
 "ZAWAHRI'S ORDERS" 
 
 He added that the strike had been carried out in "implementation" of the order of overall al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, who has urged Muslims to attack the West using any means they can find. 
 
 Ansi also gave credit for the operation to slain AQAP propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, a preacher cited by one of the gunmen in remarks to French media as a financier of the attack. 
 
 It was not clear how Awlaki, killed by a U.S. drone in 2011, had a direct link to the Paris assault, but he inspired several militants in the United States and Britain to acts of violence. 
 
 The purported claim of responsibility put a new spotlight on a group often cited by Western officials as al Qaeda's most dangerous branch. AQAP has recently focused on fighting government forces and Shi'ite rebels in Yemen, but says it still aims to carry out attacks abroad. 
 
 AQAP mocked a huge rally of solidarity for the victims held in Paris on Sunday, saying the shock on display showed the feebleness of the Western leaders who attended. 
 
 "Look at how they gathered, rallied and supported each other, strengthening their weakness and dressing their wounds," it said. 
 
 Al Qaeda offshoot Islamic State released a video that it said showed interviews with three French fighters in Syria praising the attacks, the SITE monitoring service reported. 
 
 One said: "I say to the French people who think that the Islamic State will not reach Europe: With permission from Allah the Almighty, we will reach Europe – all of Europe." 
 
 "JOY AT TORMENT" 
 
 SITE also said Nigeria's Boko Haram group had released a video showing its leader welcoming the attacks. “We have felt joy for what befell the people of France in terms of torment, as their blood was spilled inside their country. Allah is Great!" Abubakar Shekau said in the recording, according to SITE. 
 
 One Western source described Ansi as an Al Qaeda hawk reputed to have advocated a merger with the even more hardline Islamic State. 
 
 Two senior Yemeni sources said Cherif and Said Kouachi had met Awlaki in Yemen and undergone weapons training in the eastern province of Marib. However, a Marib tribal leader denied that they had trained there in 2011 or that Awlaki had been based there. 
 
 AQAP's Yemeni leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, was once a close associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, whose father was born in Yemen, a neighbor of Saudi Arabia. 
 
 Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi complained on Wednesday that Yemen had been subjected to a politicized media campaign over the alleged 2011 visit. 
 
 "The person reported to have traveled to Yemen to learn in three days how to fire a pistol had been detained and under investigation for two years in France," Hadi said, according to the state news agency Saba. Hadi asked why such suspicious elements had been allowed to travel to Yemen and return home without being questioned. 
 
 (Reporting by Ahmed Tolba in Cairo, Yara Bayoumy in Dubai, Mohammed Ghobari in Sanaa and Lesley Wroughton and Doina Chiacu in Washington, Editing by William Maclean, Dominic Evans and Kevin Liffey) ||||| PARIS (AP) — Tens of thousands of people including more than 40 world leaders streamed into the heart of Paris on Sunday for a rally of national unity to honor the 17 victims of three days of terror. 
 
 French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, left, waves to the public as he enters in his car during a demonstration organized by members of the Union of French Jewish students outside a kosher grocery store... (Associated Press) 
 
 Members of the Union of French Jewish students hold posters with the first names of the victims during a demonstration outside a kosher grocery store where four hostages were killed on Friday in Paris,... (Associated Press) 
 
 The aftermath of the attacks remained raw, with video emerging of one of the gunmen killed during police raids pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group and detailing how the attacks were going to unfold. Also, a new shooting was linked to that gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed Friday along with the brothers behind a massacre at satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in nearly simultaneous raids by security forces. 
 
 "Today, Paris is the capital of the world," said French President Francois Hollande . "Our entire country will rise up toward something better." 
 
 Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were among the leaders attending, as were top representatives of Russia and Ukraine. 
 
 Rallies were also planned in London, Madrid and New York — all attacked by al-Qaida-linked extremists — as well as Cairo, Sydney, Stockholm, Tokyo and elsewhere. 
 
 "We are all Charlie, we are all police, we are all Jews of France," Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared on Saturday, referring to the victims of the attacks that included employees at Charlie Hebdo, shoppers at a kosher grocery and three police officers. 
 
 The three days of terror began Wednesday when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the newsroom of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people. Al-Qaida's branch in Yemen said it directed the attack by the masked gunmen to avenge the honor of the Prophet Muhammad, a frequent target of the weekly's satire. On Thursday, police said Coulibaly killed a policewoman on the outskirts of Paris and on Friday, the attackers converged. 
 
 While the Kouachi brothers holed up in a printing plant near Charles de Gaulle airport, Coulibaly seized hostages inside a kosher market. It all ended at dusk Friday with near-simultaneous raids at the printing plant and the market that left all three gunmen dead. Four hostages at the market were also killed. 
 
 Five people who were held in connection with the attacks were freed late Saturday, leaving no one in custody, according to the Paris prosecutor's office. The widow of the man who attacked the kosher market is still being sought and was last traced near the Turkey-Syrian border. 
 
 Early Sunday, police in Germany detained two men suspected of an arson attack against a newspaper that republished the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. No one was injured in that attack. 
 
 "The terrorists want two things: they want to scare us and they want to divide us. We must do the opposite. We must stand up and we must stay united," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told French TV channel iTele on Sunday. 
 
 It was France's deadliest terrorist attack in decades, and the country remains on high alert while investigators determine whether the attackers were part of a larger extremist network. More than 5,500 police and soldiers were being deployed on Sunday across France, about half of them to protect the march. The others were guarding synagogues, mosques, schools and other sites around France. 
 
 "I hope that we will again be able to say we are happy to be Jews in France," said Haim Korsia, the chief rabbi in France, who planned to attend the rally. 
 
 "I hope that at the end of the day everyone is united. Everyone, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists," added Zakaria Moumni, who was at Republique early Sunday. "We are humans first of all. And nobody deserves to be murdered like that. Nobody." 
 
 At an international conference in India, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the world stood with the people of France "not just in anger and in outrage, but in solidarity and commitment to the cause of confronting extremism and in the cause that extremists fear so much and that has always united our countries: freedom." 
 
 Posthumous video emerged Sunday of Coulibaly, who prosecutors said was newly linked by ballistics tests to a third shooting — the Wednesday attack on a jogger in a Paris suburb that left the 32-year-old man gravely injured. In the video, Coulibaly speaks fluent French and broken Arabic, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group and detailing the terror operation he said was about to unfold. 
 
 The Kouachi brothers claimed the attacks were planned and financed by al-Qaida in Yemen. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Oleg Cetinic and Elaine Ganley contributed from Paris. Aron Heller contributed from Jerusalem.
– Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack in an online video called "Vengeance for the Prophet: A Message Regarding the Blessed Battle of Paris," the New York Times reports. The group says it "chose the target, laid the plan, and financed the operation" in "a vengeance for the messenger of Allah"—a likely reference to Charlie Hebdo's parodies of the Prophet Muhammad. But while AQAP called the Kouachi brothers "two heroes of Islam," it suggests it wasn't behind the attacks that followed, including on a kosher supermarket. Gunman Amedy Coulibaly's actions were a coincidence, the statement says, calling him simply a "mujahid brother." The Charlie Hebdo attackers claimed to be working for AQAP, while Coulibaly has pledged support for ISIS, the BBC notes. The statement, made by AQAP leader Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi, says the attack was an "implementation" of orders from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the larger al-Qaeda group, Reuters reports. The video also featured an image of the Eiffel Tower dissolving, the Times reports. Meanwhile, today's issue of Charlie Hebdo sold out in minutes.