PARIS (Reuters) – The French satirical newsweekly Charlie Hebdo will this week mark 10 years since 12 people died in an attack on its newsroom with a special edition of the magazine.
On the cover of the 32-page issue, sections of which were released on Monday, a man sits on the butt of a gun in front of the word “Indestructible!”.
“Today the values of Charlie Hebdo – such as humour, satire, freedom of expression, ecology, secularism, feminism, to name a few – have never been so under threat,” the magazine’s editor Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, who survived the attack, wrote in an editorial.
“Satire possesses a virtue that helped us make it through these tragic years: optimism. If we want to laugh, that means we want to live. Laughing, irony, caricature are manifestations of optimism,” the editorial added.
On Jan. 7, 2015, a pair of brothers stormed the magazine’s newsroom in what prosecutors said was a bid to avenge the Prophet Mohammad. The gunmen paused to ensure that editor Stephane Charbonnier was among the dead.
The magazine, which has long tested the limits of free speech, had published cartoons mocking the Prophet about a decade earlier. In Islam, depictions of the Prophet are considered blasphemous.
Over the next two days, a third attacker killed a female police officer and then four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb. That gunman said in a video that the attacks were coordinated and carried out in the name of the militant group Islamic State.
All three gunmen died in shootouts with the police in separate standoffs.
The attacks spurred an outpouring of sympathy expressed in a hashtag, “I Am Charlie”. But they also marked the beginning of a wave of Islamist violence in France.
French political leaders will attend events on Tuesday commemorating the attacks.
(Reporting by Makini Brice; Editing by Ros Russell)
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