America News Agency

After brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi stormed the newspaper’s offices in January 2015, killing 11 people, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie spread worldwide. The duo, who killed many of France’s most renowned journalists and cartoonists, also shot dead a wounded police officer lying on the pavement.

This was the first of three days of terrorist attacks in the French capital. The following day, Amedy Coulibaly shot a trainee police officer, and on January 9, he took hostages and killed four people — three shoppers and one employee — at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket.

All three attackers were killed in separate clashes with police on January 9. The killings were a response to cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo in 2006. Former editor Philippe Val said on Sunday that he did not regret publishing the cartoons.

This week’s special commemorative issue, number 1694, was printed as a 32-page double edition, with 300,000 copies available for two weeks at €5 each. Issue number 1178, released on January 14, 2015, and known as the “survivors’ issue,” sold 8 million copies.

The special edition, published to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks, focuses on freedom of expression, a hallmark of Charlie Hebdo. It features work by prominent cartoonists as well as 40 out of 350 cartoons submitted for an international competition on religion. The newspaper invited participants to “draw your anger against the pressure of all religions on your freedoms.”

The front page of this special edition declares the satirical magazine “indestructible” and depicts a reader enjoying this “historic” 32-page issue of Charlie while sitting on an assault rifle.

France 2 television will ask in a special program on freedom of expression: “Are we still all Charlie?” The program aims to “decode the current threat.” It will feature terrorism experts, Charlie Hebdo journalists, as well as teachers, students, actors, artists, and writers discussing topics such as secularism.

In October 2020, geography and history teacher Samuel Paty, aged 47, was beheaded by an Islamist terrorist after asking his class during an ethics lesson: “To be Charlie or not to be?”

A month earlier, Pakistani citizen Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud attacked two people with a machete outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices, seriously injuring them. Mahmoud will stand trial in Paris on Monday for attempted murder.