France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine will REPUBLISH Mohammed cartoons for start of terror trial

France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine is reprinting its controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to mark the start of a trial over the 2015 terror attack at the paper’s offices.  

‘We will never lie down. We will never give up,’ Charlie Hebdo director Laurent Sourisseau wrote in an editorial to go with the cartoons today. 

Twelve people were killed in the gun rampage in January 2015, before a policewoman and four Jewish shoppers died in related attacks over the following two days.  

The trial of 14 alleged accomplices, who are charged with various crimes including supplying weapons and putting the killers in contact with ISIS, begins in Paris tomorrow.   

The cover of the latest Charlie Hebdo issue shows a dozen cartoons first published by Charlie Hebdo in 2006 which unleashed a storm of anger in the Muslim world. 

In the centre of the Charlie Hebdo cover is a cartoon of the prophet drawn by its cartoonist Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, who was killed in the massacre.

‘All of this, just for that,’ the front-page headline says.

Its editorial team wrote that now was the right time to republish the cartoons, saying it was ‘essential’ as the trial opens.

‘We have often been asked since January 2015 to print other caricatures of Mohammed,’ it said.

‘We have always refused to do so, not because it is prohibited – the law allows us to do so – but because there was a need for a good reason to do it, a reason which has meaning and which brings something to the debate.’ 

Charlie Hebdo is now published in conditions of utmost secrecy, and its staff are surrounded by armed guards and other security measures.

One said earlier this year that its new offices were ‘like Fort Knox…with numerous special doors…lifts, stairs, airlock passages and a code word signifying a serious threat that would send everyone to the panic room.’

Some of France’s most celebrated cartoonists were killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi opened fire at the paper’s offices. 

The attackers killed building maintenance worker Frederic Boisseau before forcing cartoonist Corinne Rey to give them access to the building. 

Within a few minutes, editor-in-chief Stephane ‘Charb’ Charbonnier and cartoonists Cabut, Bernard Verlhac, Georges Wolinski and Philippe Honore were all dead, as well as economist Bernard Maris, columnist Elsa Cayat, Charb’s bodyguard Franck Brinsolaro, visitor Michel Renaud and proof-reader Mustapha Ourrad.  

As they fled, the terrorists were heard shouting: ‘We have killed Charlie Hebdo. We have taken revenge for the sake of the Prophet Mohammed.’

Once outside, they opened fire again and killed their 12th victim, police officer Ahmed Merabet, before fleeing to the Paris suburbs.  

With France still in shock, the attacks continued the next day when Amedy Coulibaly, an acquaintance of Cherif Kouachi, killed a female police officer, Clarissa Jean-Philippe.  

On January 9, Coulibaly killed four Jewish men at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris after taking hostages and demanding that the Kouachi brothers go free. 

French special forces eventually stormed the Hyper Cacher store, killing Coulibaly and freeing 15 surviving hostages. 

The Kouachi brothers were killed by police in a separate stand-off at a printworks where they had taken refuge.  

In a video recording, Coulibaly said the attacks were co-ordinated and carried out in the name of the so-called Islamic State. 

However, Al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch also said its leadership had ordered the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices. 

Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly, had long tested the limits of what society would accept in the name of free speech, including with its depictions of Mohammed. 

But the attacks led to a global outpouring of solidarity with the magazine, symbolised by the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’, meaning ‘I am Charlie’. 

The magazine’s first edition after the attack featured a cartoon of a tearful Prophet Mohammed holding a ‘Je suis Charlie’ sign under the headline ‘All is forgiven’. 

Millions of copies of the so-called ‘survivors’ edition’ were printed, dwarfing the usual 60,000 print run. 

Later in 2015, another wave of Islamist attacks killed 130 people in co-ordinated bombings and shootings at the Bataclan theatre and other locations in Paris. 

The following year, a Tunisian who pledged allegiance to ISIS ploughed his truck through a crowd in the Mediterranean city of Nice, killing 86 people.   

The Charlie Hebdo trial – which was delayed by several months because of coronavirus – will be held in Paris and is due to run until November 10. 

The alleged accomplices have been charged with crimes including supplying weapons, membership of a terrorist organisation and financing terrorism. 

In a first for a terror trial, the proceedings will be filmed for archival purposes given the public interest in the case.  

Of the 14 defendants, three will be tried in absentia and may be dead. 

Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly’s partner at the time of the attack, and brothers Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine are believed to have travelled to areas of Syria under the control of ISIS just before the attacks.

Mohamed Belhoucine is accused of being the ideological mentor of Coulibaly after meeting him in jail and opening up channels of communication for him to ISIS. 

Among those in the dock will be Ali Riza Polat who investigators allege helped the three attackers amass their weapons. He faces life in jail if found guilty.  

Just after the attacks, he repeatedly tried to leave France for Syria but has been held since March 2015. 

People who escaped the massacres are set to give testimony at a trial into one of the darkest chapters in modern French history.

‘This trial is an important moment for them,’ Marie-Laure Barre and Nathalie Senyk, lawyers for victims at Charlie Hebdo, said in a statement.

‘They are waiting for justice to be done to find out who did what, knowing that those who pulled the trigger are no longer there,’ they added.

The trial comes amid a fresh controversy in the media after a black female politician was depicted as a chained slave in a leading conservative magazine.

Valeurs Actuelles (Current Values) could is facing a probe by Paris prosecutors for the seven-page illustrated feature on French MP Danièle Obono, 40.