SANAA: One of two brothers suspected of carrying out the deadly shooting at a French satirical weekly met leading Al-Qaeda preacher Anwar Al-Awlaki during a stay in Yemen in 2011, a senior Yemeni intelligence source told Reuters on Friday.

US-born Awlaki was prominent in spreading Al-Qaeda’s militant message to European and English-speaking audiences and was an influential leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s most active affiliate. He was killed in September 2011 in a drone strike widely attributed to the CIA.

US and European sources close to the investigation said on Thursday that one of the suspects in the French attack, Said Kouachi, was in Yemen for several months training with AQAP.

The Yemeni source said Kouachi, 34, was among a number of foreigners who entered the country for religious studies.

Said and his brother Cherif, 32, are at the center of a huge manhunt in France following the killing of 12 people by gunmen at the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

The two suspects are French-born sons of Algerian-born parents. Both men had been under police surveillance. Cherif was jailed for 18 months for trying to travel to Iraq a decade ago to fight as part of an Islamist cell.

There was no claim of responsibility for Wednesday’s attack. However, a witness quoted by 20 Minutes daily newspaper said one of the assailants cried out before getting into his car: “Tell the media that it is Al-Qaeda in Yemen!“

The Western intelligence sources said that after Said Kouachi returned to France from Yemen, both brothers appeared to have refrained from any activities that might have drawn the attention of French law enforcement or spy agencies.

Meanwhile, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Turkey’s top Muslim scholar denounced “terrorism” and violence committed in the name of Islam.

In remarks carried by Iranian media on Friday, Rouhani said “violence and terrorism is reprehensible whether in this region, in Europe or in the United States”.

“Those who kill and carry out violent and extremist acts unjustly in the name of jihad, religion or Islam provoke Islamophobia whether they wish it or not,” said Rouhani.

Turkey’s top Muslim scholar Mehmet Gormez denounced the attack on the French satirical weekly as an “unacceptable” action targeting all faiths including Islam, saying he was pained to see Islamic values used as a pretext for slaughter.

Mehmet Gormez, the head of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate — known as Diyanet in Turkish — told AFP in an interview that the massacre was an attack on all faiths, including Islam.

“I see this attack not only (as an attack) against a magazine’s employers, France, the West or Europe but against all faiths, all esteemed values and God’s messages of mercy and grace conveyed by the Prophet (peace be upon him) to humanity,” he said.

Gormez expressed fury that the attackers had used sacred Islamic words like “Allahu Akbar” read out to every Muslim when they are born and repeated in each prayer time.

“The brutal massacre of people is unacceptable. It is similarly unacceptable that they are carried out in the name of religion.”

While unequivocally condemning the attack “without any buts,” Gormez said he deemed freedom of expression significant but said it has a limit. “I believe that denigrating or insulting the values that make a person human — in the name of freedom of expression — is not correct.”

“When it is looked at by a different faith or culture, defamation — especially on the subject of faith — could become cultural torture,” he said.

Gormez said violent attacks were not linked to Islamic traditions and they were carried out by individuals with “wounded conscious and fatal identities” who were raised in the shadow of wars and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Neither Damascus nor Baghdad were cities in history where extremists speaking fluent Oxford English beheaded other people,” he said, referring to the murders committed by Islamic State (IS) EU-born jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

The attack, suspected to have been carried out by two French brothers of Algerian origin — has raised fears of a surge in anti-Muslim feelings in Europe with public sentiment already inflamed by the atrocities committed by IS.

Reprising a theme of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gormez said that Islamophobia in the West “has transformed into an industry.”

But he said that those who were behind the massacre were trying to whip up an increase in Islamophobia in Europe.

“But I believe that common sense will prevail,” he said, expressing hope that people of all faiths, including atheists, “will join hands and learn lessons from this scourge.”

European Union President Donald Tusk said Friday the deadly attack in Paris underscores the need for an airline data sharing proposal that has been blocked by EU lawmakers.