Paris: For Didier the salesman, a humdrum meeting with a client at a printing business on the outskirts of Paris yesterday turned into a run-in with France’s most wanted men as he ‘shook hands’ with one of the magazine massacre suspects.

He told France Inter radio how he came face-to-face with one of the suspects holed up in the small CTD office in Dammartin-en-Goele, about 30 minutes north of the French capital. “When I arrived, my client came out with an armed man who said he was from the police.