Six on trial in France for second attack 10 years after Charlie Hebdo

Six men face a three-week trial starting on Monday for their involvement in a knife attack which injured two people outside the former offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in September 2020.

The attack occurred five years after two Islamist extremists stormed the publication’s offices with assault rifles in 2015, killing 12 people, including eight of the newspaper’s staff.

The two French-born brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, claimed the weekly printed offensive caricatures of Prophet Muhammed as a justification for the act. The Kouachi brothers, said to have been radicalised in the early 2000s and affiliated with al-Qaeda, were killed in a stand-off with the national gendarmerie at a printshop in Dammartin-en-Goële after they fled the scene in Paris.

Days later, Amedy Coulibaly invoked his loyalty to the so-called Islamic State terrorist group before shooting a policewoman to death and storming a Jewish kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher in Paris. Coulibaly killed four hostages before dying in a police shootout.

Ten years on, French President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo will commemorate the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks through a series of events in Paris. Other remembrance ceremonies are planned across the country in memory of the victims and series of killings which rattled the nation.

Days after the consecutive attacks which took place in January 2015, 4 million French people marched in solidarity, while the slogan “Je suis Charlie” went viral worldwide on social media.

14 accomplices in the 2015 attacks

Zaheer Mahmood, who is on trial for acting as the meat cleaver bearer in the 2020 attack, did not know that Charlie Hebdo had moved offices after January 2015 when he carried out the assault.

He targeted two individuals standing outside the publication’s former offices on their cigarette break, but who did not work for Charlie Hebdo. Both victims survived.

In December 2020, a Paris court found 14 people guilty of acting as accomplices in the 2015 attacks. On the eve of the trial, which began in September 2020, Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, which it had printed in 2015, alongside the pictures of the murdered staff members and the caption “All of this, for this.”

The French weekly has faced fierce criticism for what has been repeatedly qualified as an unacceptable lack of respect for the religion’s holy figure.

In Algeria, thousands of protesters thronged the streets of the capital of Algiers, denouncing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the weeks after the 2015 attack.

Charlie Hebdo found itself under fire for other cartoons as well: in 2016, the local authorities in the Italian town of Amatrice sued the satirical newspaper for “aggravated defamation” after it depicted the victims of an earthquake in the town which left nearly 300 dead as Italian dishes, and their blood as pasta sauce.

Freedom of speech

During police interrogations, the 2020 attacker Zaheer Mahmood said one of the drawings of Prophet Muhammad, which was republished in Charlie Hebdo in early September 2020, as a cause behind his “anger”.

On the morning of the attack, he stated, “here, today, on Friday 25 September, I’m going to go and revolt against that,” in a video shared on social media.

Charlie Hebdo has long prided itself on defending free speech and its anti-establishment stances. Its irreverent satire has long taken aim at politicians, organised religion, and extremism.

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In a special 32-page issue to be released on Tuesday commemorating the 2015 massacre, the publication described itself as “indestructible”, reaffirming its commitment to freedom of expression and humour.

“Satire has a virtue which has helped us through these tragic years: optimism. If you feel like laughing, you feel like living. Laughter, irony and caricature are expressions of optimism”, stated Laurent Sourisseau, known as “Riss”, the cartoonist and publication director.

“Whatever happens, dramatic or happy, the desire to laugh will never disappear,” added Riss, a survivor of the 2015 attacks.

Mahmood faces charges of terrorist murder, while the five other defendants on trial are accused of criminal terrorist conspiracy, according to documents seen by French news outlet France Info. Three of the men, all Pakistani, were under 18 in 2020, meaning the trial has to be held at a juvenile court.

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Although Mahmood did not pledge allegiance to a specific terrorist group, investigators revealed his interest in videos of Khadim Hussain Rizvi, founder of the Islamist party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan. Rizvi’s party backs the country’s controversial blasphemy laws that carry a death sentence for insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.