French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute on Saturday to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo, Montrouge and Hyper Cacher attacks eight years ago. He recalled on Twitter the names of the 17 victims and promised to “never” forget them.
“Cabu, Wolinski, Charb, Tignous, Honoré, Bernard Maris, Elsa Cayat, Frédéric Boisseau, Franck Brinsolaro, Ahmed Merabet, Mustapha Ourrad, Michel Renaud, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, François-Michel Saada : we will never forget you”, wrote the president.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne also paid tribute to the victims. “Faced with Islamist terrorism, the Republic stands tall. For their families, for our values, for our freedom: let’s not forget,” she tweeted.
“Intrinsic to our democracy”
“Satire, irreverence, the republican tradition of press cartoons are intrinsic to our democracy. We continue to defend them”, also reacted the Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak.
A ceremony took place in particular in front of the former premises of Charlie Hebdo, in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, in the presence, among others, of the President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin and the Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo.
It was in these premises that the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi had killed 11 people on January 7, 2015. Among the victims, emblematic figures of “Charlie”, such as its director and cartoonist Charb, the caricaturists Cabu, Wolinksi, Honoré, Tignous and economist Bernard Maris.
A few meters further, police lieutenant Ahmed Merabet had been killed by the Kouachi brothers while trying to stop them in their flight. The two Islamists claimed to belong to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqpa) and had come to “avenge the prophet” Muhammad who had been caricatured in the satirical newspaper. They had been killed following two days on the run.
Tensions with Tehran
On January 8, another jihadist, Amédy Coulibaly, killed a policewoman in Montrouge. The next day, this radicalized delinquent claiming to be from IS had killed four hostages, all Jews, in a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris. He had been shot down in the assault.
Eight years later, Charlie Hebdo found itself this week at the heart of a diplomatic crisis following the publication of cartoons on the Iranian regime deemed insulting by Tehran. Iran announced Thursday the closure of the oldest and most important French study center in the country, the French Institute for Research in Iran (IFRI), affiliated with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This article has been published automatically. Sources: ats / afp
