PARIS: Blood-curdling, Al Qaeda-inspired murder that tore at the heart of the nation which raised him was not ghoulish enough for Cherif Kouachi. His body, felled by elite soldiers' bullets and stun grenades, was not yet cold when he also came back from the dead.

Kouachi had picked up the phone when a reporter for news channel BFM rang the printing plant, his and his elder brother Said's final redoubt, where an army of soldiers, police officers, and helicopters cornered them after a 40-plus-hour manhunt through villages and woodlands of northern France.

BFM waited until after the brothers and another member of their terror cell, who killed four hostages in a kosher grocery in Paris, were dead before broadcasting its haunting audio.

Sounding determined and so chillingly sure of himself and his extremist rhetoric, Kouachi's fluent French put words to France's worst nightmare: its own sons, heads filled with dreams of murder and martyrdom, coming home from foreign battlefields to wage war.

“We are the defenders of the Prophet,” he said. “I, Cherif Kouachi, was sent by Al Qaeda from Yemen.” Paris will never quite be the same after the carnage that started Wednesday. Never again will fears of homegrown terrorists coming back battled-hardened by extremist training, indoctrination and fighting in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere to commit mass murder be just theories.