As the trial starts against 14 perpetrators who helped carry out terror strike against French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in 2015, the magazine has decided to reprint its cartoons of Mohammed, the AFP reported.
On 7 January 2015, two Muslim gunmen opened fire, killing twelve people that included nine staff of the magazine, two cops and one maintenance worker. The police later identified the two terrorists as Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, French Muslim brothers of Algerian descent.
As they fled the office, the terrorists were heard shouting ‘We have killed Charlie Hebdo. We have taken revenge for the sake of the Prophet Mohammed.’
As the magazine which has cited free speech and is going to go ahead with the republications of the controversial cartoon, the French government has warned of reprisal.
Charlie Hebdo director Laurent Sourisseau wrote in an editorial to go with the cartoons today and said. “We will never lie down. We will never give up”.
The 14 perpetrators are charged with various crimes including supplying weapons, membership of a terrorist organisation and financing terrorism. The massacre at the weekly took the life of its editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier, cartoonists Cabut, Bernard Verlhac, Georges Wolinski and Philippe Honore, economist Bernard Maris, columnist Elsa Cayat, Charb’s bodyguard Franck Brinsolaro, visitor Michel Renaud and proof-reader Mustapha Ourrad.
The cover of the latest Charlie Hebdo issue shows a dozen cartoons first published by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005 — and then reprinted by Charlie Hebdo in 2006.
The French government is on the toes and Interior Minister has said that the main threat the country faces today is the risk of terror of Sunni origin.