Protests are being held in cities across Europe after three gunmen shot dead 12 people at the office of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.
Eleven people have been confirmed as being injured in the attack, four of them seriously. Le Monde reports that three suspects have been identified by police.
A major police operation was under way to find three gunmen who fled by car and an additional 500 police have been deployed on the streets of Paris. Parts of Paris remain in lockdown. It is believed to be the deadliest attack in France since 1961, when right-wingers who wanted to keep Algeria French bombed a train, killing 28 people.
L’Humanité reports the gunmen were let in to the building – which Charlie Hebdo shares with another media organisation – after threatening a designer, Corinne Rey and her daughter. “had gone to pick up my daughter at daycare , arriving at the door the building of two hooded men armed newspaper and brutally threatened us. They wanted to enter, go up. I typed the code. They shot Wolinski , Cabu ... it lasted five minutes ... I had taken refuge under a desk ...”
At least 35,000 held vigils in Paris, and some 20,000 people turned out in the French cities of Lyon and Toulouse, police said. Thousands more took to the streets in cities including Bordeaux and Marseille. There were also rallies in European cities such as Berlin, London and Lausanne.
Many demonstrators wore black stickers with the words “Je suis Charlie”, a slogan aimed at showing solidarity with the victims of the deadliest attack in France in decades and in support of the paper’s decision to print controversial prophet Mohammed cartoons. The magazine’s website currently features the same legend.
The BBC reports that President Francois Hollande called the incident a “cowardly murder” and declared a day of national mourning.
He said the country’s tradition of free speech had been attacked and called on all French people to stand together. “Our best weapon is our unity”.
US President Barack Obama has condemned the “cowardly, evil” assault and pledged US assistance to Paris to bring the attackers to justice. Speaking from the Oval Office he said: “France is one of our oldest allies, our strongest allies.
“For us to see the kind of cowardly, evil attacks that took place today, I think, reinforces once again why it’s so important for us to stand in solidarity with them, just as they stand in solidarity with us.
“The fact that this was an attack on journalists, attack on our free press, also underscores the degree to which these terrorists fear freedom -- of speech and freedom of the press,” he added.
Stephane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, was among four cartoonists killed in the massacre. Charbonnier, known as "Charb", was 47. He had received death threats in the past and had been under police protection.
Writing in the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding says “Only a narrow provincialism imagines that blasphemy is not a dangerous pastime. But Charlie Hebdo isn’t a cosy backwater: it has always blasphemed in earnest, as a vocational duty with high attendant risks; the signs are pretty clear so far that this terrible attack was carried out as a lesson of some kind.”
The magazine’s offices were bombed in 2011, after it released an issue in which the Prophet Muhammad was satirically billed as a “guest editor”. The New York Times quotes Sohail Z. Husain, a pediatrician and member of the Muslim Writers Guild of America after that attack.
In his lifetime, the Prophet strictly prohibited anyone from harming those who mocked him. Instead, he prayed for them and returned insult with kindness, so much so that some of their children actually decided to join the Prophet. If he were the guest editor for Charlie Hebdo, as fictitiously suggested, the Prophet would have unequivocally decried the bombing but also would have called on citizens of all faiths to make merry by working together, not by making a jest of one another’s saints.
In the New Yorker, Amy North writes that satire was Charlie Hebdo’s mission, “and a necessary one”. “The magazine made fun of people—of many faiths, for many follies, which we all need to be reminded that we have. Some of the cartoons were blatantly, roughly sexual, and not designed to endear them to Jews or Christians.”
“Those who comment through satire are peculiarly bold, more so than those who deploy argument,” writes Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. “Ridicule is the most devastating and wounding of weapons. It reaches parts of the political and personal psyche that reason cannot touch. It is one of democracy’s most effective weapons, and the price those who wield it have to pay is sometimes as high as any other.”
And Buzzfeed sums up the reaction from cartoonists, with pictures that speak many words.
Cover image: AFP