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The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has said it will republish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to mark the start of the trial for the 2015 attack on its offices.
He announced that they would reappear when the trial of the alleged accomplices of three men involved in the attack begins.
Some of the magazine’s best-known cartoonists were among the 12 people who died when Said and Cherif Kouachi opened fire in their offices.
The brothers and an acquaintance from the prison, who killed five people in the 48 hours after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, were eventually shot to death by police in separate clashes.
Twelve Charlie Hebdo employees were killed by the Kouachi brothers
Fourteen of his alleged accomplices go to trial on Wednesday.
Charlie Hebdo said it was necessary to republish the images for the start of the trial and that “the only reasons not to do so stem from political or journalistic cowardice.”
“We will never lie down. We will never give up,” wrote editor Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau.
The images include one of Mohammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a burning wick sticking out.
In an editorial accompanying the images this week, the newspaper said the drawings “belong to history, and history cannot be rewritten or erased.”
Cherif Kouachi (left), 32, and her brother Said Kouachi (right), 34, were shot and killed by police.
Charlie Hebdo used the same images in 2006, a year after they were first published by a Danish newspaper.
At the time, jihadists online warned that the magazine would pay for publishing the images. For Muslims, any representation of the Prophet is blasphemous.
The decision to republish the cartoons will be seen by some as a defiant gesture in defense of freedom of expression, but others may see it as just another provocation from a magazine that has long sparked controversy with its satirical attacks on religion.
The gunmen seen after they opened fire at Charlie Hebdo’s offices
The French Council of the Muslim faith tweeted in response: “The freedom to caricature and the freedom to dislike are enshrined and nothing justifies violence.”
In 2007, a French court rejected accusations by Islamic groups that the post incited hatred against Muslims after they claimed that the turban cartoon marked all Muslims as terrorists.
The groups said another Charlie Hebdo cartoon did as well, after it showed the Prophet reacting to Islamic militants by saying, “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.”
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