Parisians remember 'shameful' Charlie Hebdo attack ten years on

Record ID: 1895721

  • Title: Parisians remember 'shameful' Charlie Hebdo attack ten years on
  • Date: 7th January 2025
  • Summary: PARIS, FRANCE (JANUARY 7, 2025) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF MAN CLEANING KIOSK WITH POSTER SHOWING LATEST FRONT PAGE OF FRENCH SATIRICAL NEWSPAPER CHARLIE HEBDO MARKING TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF ATTACK NEWSPAPER STAND AND PLACE DE LA REPUBLIQUE STATUE MAN ARRANGING NEWSPAPERS IN STAND MAN TAKING LATEST CHARLIE HEBDO ISSUE AND SHOWING FRONT PAGE (SOUNDBITE) (French) PARISIAN STAGE ACTO
  • Embargoed: 21st January 2025 10:47
  • Keywords: Charlie Hebdo France attack terrorism
  • Location: PARIS, FRANCE
  • City: PARIS, FRANCE
  • Country: France
  • Topics: Crime/Law/Justice,Crime,Europe
  • Reuters ID: LVA001136907012025RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Ten years after the attack on the French satirical newsweekly Charlie Hebdo, some Parisians on Tuesday (January 7) said they thought freedom of expression had gone "backwards".
    On January 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.
    "I think that we can still say anything, but there is fear. And as we have seen with certain teachers, like with Samuel Paty for example, it is not really freedom of expression - it is, but it's within the school framework," said 18-year-old Parisian student, Alice Affoh.
    The French teacher, Samuel Paty, had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, including the Charlie Hebdo cartoon, as part of a lesson on freedom of expression, and was beheaded.
    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.
    "I feel a lot of emotion because I remember everything - the moment, the attacks, this big demonstration here in which there were millions of us", said 66-year-old Parisian, Alain Kassimatis
    (Production: Marco Trujillo, Lauren Bacquie)
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2025. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
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