Members of the media walk into the courtroom where the trial will take place for the shooting at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020. (Image: AP Photo / Michel Euler)
Twelve people, including some of France’s most famous cartoonists, were killed on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi made a gun rampage at the newspaper’s Paris offices.
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The French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of a massacre by Islamist gunmen in 2015, said Tuesday it was republishing hugely controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to mark the start of the trial this week of suspected accomplices in the attack.
“We will never sleep. We will never give up,” wrote its director Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau in an editorial to accompany the reissue of the cartoons in their latest edition.
Twelve people, including some of France’s most famous cartoonists, were killed on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi made a gun rampage at the newspaper’s Paris offices.
The perpetrators were killed in the wake of the massacre, but 14 suspected accomplices to the attacks, which also targeted a Jewish supermarket, will be tried in Paris on Wednesday.
The cover of the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo features a dozen cartoons first published by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005, and then reprinted by Charlie Hebdo in 2006, sparking a storm of anger in the Muslim world.
In the center of the cover there is a caricature of the prophet drawn by his cartoonist Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, who lost his life in the massacre.
“All this, just for that,” says the headline on the cover.
His editorial team wrote that now was the right time to republish the cartoons, saying it was “essential” at the start of the trial.
“We have often been asked since January 2015 to print other cartoons of Muhammad,” it read.
“We have always refused to do it, not because it is prohibited, the law allows us, but because there was a good reason to do it, a reason that makes sense and that adds something to the debate.”
The newspaper’s willingness to offend has made it a defender of free speech for many in France, while others believed it crossed the line too often.
But the massacre united the country in grief with the #JeSuisCharlie (I Am Charlie) slogan going viral.
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