The special forces team said they worked 50 straight hours before they launched their assault on Friday, fatigue diminished by the thought of avenging their colleague Ahmed Merabet.

He was killed in cold blood two days earlier during an attack by brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Eye-witness footage of the execution caused revulsion around the world.

‘Sincerely, one of the things that most motivated us was that video of the odious assassination of our colleague Ahmed Merabet outside Charlie. We all had that image in our heads,’ Jean-Pierre, one of the members of the Raid police team that brought the deli siege to an end, told Le Parisien, according to the Daily Telegraph.

He said that the stand-off between the police and the Kouachi brothers at a warehouse in Dammartin-en-Goele acted like a shot of adrenalin, despite having been on duty for over two days.

He added: ‘When that attack begun, we were suddenly not tired anymore.’

Another member of the assault team, named as Stan, revealed that they had snipers training their sights on the supermarket, in the Porte de Vincennes area of the city, but couldn’t get a clean shot because there were advertising posters in the windows.

A third member of the team, named as Marc by the French newspaper, told how deli gunman Amedy Coulibaly was met with a wall of bullets when he charged at them.

(dailymail.co.uk)