PARIS: A man who holed up in a post office in a suburb northwest of Paris with two hostages on Friday surrendered and has been arrested, a police source said.

“There was no assault, the man gave himself up”, the source said, adding that the hostages were “shocked but not injured”.

There is no known link with last week's militant attacks.

Earlier on, police cordoned off the area in Colombes, a city northwest of Paris.

Newspapers Le Figaro and Le Monde, both citing an AFP news agency dispatch based on police sources, reported that the man had been equipped with a military weapon when he took the hostages.

BFM TV said that the incident was not deemed terrorist-related.

The January 7 attack by gunmen at Charlie Hebdo's Paris offices left 12 people dead, including some of the country's most famous cartoonists.

French police arrested 12 people earlier on Friday suspected of helping the gunmen in last week's killings in Paris.

There have been numerous false alerts across the city since the attacks.