Charlie Hebdo, fearless: New cartoons of Muhammad on the eve of the mega-trial for the 2015 attacks

On January 7, 2015, in the middle of a cold winter, Paris was paralyzed between fear and uncertainty. Twelve people were killed in the newsroom of the weekly Charlie Hebdo at the hands of the Kouachi brothers, among cartoonists, the director and other officials of the written medium with an editorial line attached to satire. The next day, a man shot and killed a police officer in the Paris suburb of Montrouge. The same man, a day later, took hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket on the eastern edge of the French capital, executing four people. The jihadist attack on Charlie Hebdo was claimed from Yemen by Al-Qaeda and the man in the other two had claimed to be the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.

It was three days in a string of attacks that marked the beginning of a wave of terrorist attacks in France, and that after five years of investigations the trial of the three events will finally take place. Tomorrow begins in Paris, under close surveillance, the “Megaprocess” against 14 accused of complicity with the material perpetrators of the January 2015 attacks, who were killed by the police, with 94 lawyers, 144 witnesses and 200 persons appointed as civil charges. In addition, there will be 49 days of trial until November 10. The trial should have started initially in April but had to be postponed due to the pandemic.

It will be the first trial for a jihadist attack in the country since 2017, which involved the accomplices of a Toulouse shooter, and also the first terrorism trial in France to be filmed. French antiterrorist prosecutors requested that it be filmed because of “the emotion that aroused” the attacks, whose impact “largely crossed borders” and “profoundly marked the history of national and international terrorism.”

Of the 14 courts, only 11 will sit on the bench, since the other three are considered to be dead, missing or at large in the Iraqi-Syrian zone. It is about Hayat Boumeddiene, the partner of Amedy Coulibaly, who killed the police and took hostages in the supermarket; Mohamed Belhoucine and his brother Mehdi Belhoucine, both probably killed in Daesh ranks. Therefore, they will be tried in absentia. Hayat Boumeddiene, 32, was presumed dead, however, she reappeared a few months ago on the radars of justice after a French jihadist returning from Syria claimed to have seen her alive in a camp run by the Kurds.

Among the 11 defendants present is Ali Riza Polat, who is close to Coulibaly and is suspected of being his right hand man during the preparations for the attacks. He is accused of “complicity” in terrorist crimes, punishable by life imprisonment. Nine others are also alleged to have provided, to varying degrees, logistical assistance. Most of the defendants face charges of association with a terrorist company and risk being sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Some survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the hostage-taking at the Hyper Cacher are expected to testify at trial. “This trial is an important step for them. They are waiting for justice to be done to find out who did what, knowing that those who pulled the trigger are gone, ”Marie-Laure Barré and Nathalie Senyk, lawyers for the victims of Charlie Hebdo, told France Presse.

And in the prelude to the judicial process, Charlie Hebdo published today on its cover the drawings of the Prophet Muhammad, which made the satirical weekly the target of the jihadists, with the title “All for this.” “We will never give in. We will never quit ”, justified the director of Charlie Hebdo, Riss. “The hatred that hit us is still there and, since 2015, he has taken the time to mutate, change his appearance to go unnoticed and quietly continue his ruthless crusade,” he adds.

These 12 drawings, which were first published by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005 and then by Charlie Hebdo in 2006, showed the prophet wearing a bomb instead of a turban or as a character armed with a knife flanked by two veiled women. black. Also, in one of them there is a cartoon of the prophet crying on his knees and with the message “It is hard to be loved by idiots”, an illustration of Cabu, killed in the 2015 attack.

According to the weekly, since 2015 they have often been asked to include new cartoons of Muhammad and have always refused. “Not because it is prohibited, the law authorizes us, but because a good reason was needed to do so, a reason that makes sense and that contributes something to the debate,” they explain in an article in the edition that will be on the newsstands of the country.

On the other hand, yesterday the French government announced that they are 8,132 people registered in the alert file for the prevention of terrorist radicalization (FSPRT). “Despite the military defeat of the Islamic State (…) the external component of the threat (terrorist action carried out abroad and planned in France), although it has diminished, must continue to be the object of all our attention”, said the Monday the French Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin. “We are going to wage a relentless fight (…) we will never give up in the relentless pursuit of these enemies of the Republic,” he insisted.