Somalia's Shebab militants, Al-Qaeda's main affiliate in Africa, on Friday praised the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris as a "heroic" act.

"They made millions of Muslims happy by taking action. Some misguided people claim that freedom of expression was attacked, but that is not the case, and the two heroic people acted accordingly," Radio Andalus, the official mouthpiece of the militants, said in a commentary.

The Islamic State militant group praised the gunmen behind this week's killings at the Paris headquarters of the weekly newspaper as "heroic jihadists", a monitoring group said on Friday.

The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors radical Islamist organisations in the media, said Islamic State praised the gunmen in a brief note in its daily audio bulletin, which was distributed on Twitter and jihadi forums on Thursday.

"We start our bulletin with France. Heroic jihadists killed 12 journalists and wounded ten others working in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, and that was support for our master (Prophet) Mohammad, may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him," according to the audio bulletin.

In France, armed and masked anti-terrorism police swooped on woodland villages northeast of Paris in a manhunt for two brothers suspected of carrying out Wednesday's attack on Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper which had published cartoons of Islam's Prophet Mohammad as well as other religious and political figures.

Ten journalists and two police officers were killed in the attack, which has raised questions of security in the Western world and beyond.

Islamic State is a powerful militant group which has captured broad swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territory.

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