Editor’s Note: UH professor Stephen O’Harrow lived in Paris for many years, including in the neighborhood where the shootings took place. He is following the story as it unfolds via both the French and British media as well as direct conversation with friends in France.

This week we witnessed what will probably turn out to be a defining moment in the relationship between France and her immigrant population – one whose repercussions even further afield in Western Europe, where there are large Muslim communities, are difficult to predict.

Nonetheless, we have to say, we find some aspects of the Charlie Hebdo case, as it is currently being reported, more than a little puzzling.

The police were very swift to identify two suspects in their early 30s (brothers Cherif and Saïd Kouachi), French citizens of North African origin, plus the 18-year-old brother-in-law of one of the two, Hamyd Mourad. The Kouachi brothers were already known to the police. It is said that their identification was possible because the investigators found a “carte d’identité” inside the Citroën C-3 used by the shooters, abandoned not far from where the crime took place.

Reporters are briefed by officials outside the office of Charlie Hebdo following the shooting that killed 11 staffers at the French satire magazine.

Flickr.com/Guillaume

In addition, earlier in the day (at about 8 a.m.), a Paris policewoman was shot while investigating a car accident in the Montrouge district in the south of Paris. It was not immediately clear if the shooting was linked to Wednesday’s killings, but authorities said the assailant was dressed in similar fashion as the magazine attackers and appeared to be wearing a bulletproof vest or other bulky device under his clothing. The shooting also left a street sweeper injured.

Here are four of the problems with the story that immediately struck us as we read about it:

1) That two men were the perpetrators is without question. However, a third suspect was named, apparently because an eye-witness told police that another person was sitting in the gunmen’s car when they fled the scene of the massacre.

• Why/how did the police come to the conclusion that it must have been Hamyd Mourad?

2) The 18-year-old, Hamyd, turned himself in to police when he heard that his name was being circulated on social media.

• What should we make of the fact that it is reported that friends of his say he was at school at the time of the shooting?

• If Hamyd were indeed involved, why did he turn himself in so quickly?

• How was it that he was over a hundred kilometers away from Paris where he turned himself in?

Of course, his friends could be covering for him (as seems to have happened for one of the brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing case) and Hamyd could have been in the car (voluntarily or involuntarily) and then either escaped or been let go as the other two fled north, but that remains to be seen. In general, the circumstances of Hamyd Mourad’s involvement are curious.

3) With regard to the identity card of one of the two brothers that the police say they found in the abandoned Citroën, it seems very careless, if not oddly convenient, that men who carried out such a well-planned and professionally executed attack would accidentally leave one of their identity cards for the police to find – stranger things have happened but one could also imagine that an identity card that was either stolen or lent to the gunmen would be left to throw the investigators off the trail.

4) The one brother who had already served prison time for jihadist activities, Cherif Kouachi, does not seem to have been a particularly adept criminal. Interestingly, it is said that he was an aspiring rap artist, not unlike Abdel-Majed Abdel-Bary in London, who is thought to be the executioner shown in several ISIL videos. But the men who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack in the style of well-trained military commandos did not appear to be amateurs.

Furthermore, in a report from the BBC that the suspects had subsequently robbed a filling station north of Paris it was said they were “heavily armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers” – AK-47s and RPGs are not weapons easily available to lone-wolf fanatics, especially in France where access to guns of any kind is much more highly regulated than in the United States.

None of these questions necessarily invalidates what the media have been told by French police sources. But given the fact that France obviously needs a rapid and neat solution to he horrific events of yesterday, we may be permitted to look very carefully at what we have read and what we will soon be reading about what must be one of the saddest days in modern French history.