French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is republishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which unleashed a wave of anger in the Muslim world, to mark the start of the trial of alleged accomplices in the deadly attack against it in 2015.
The decision to republish the cartoons was seen as a renewed provocation by a magazine that has long courted with its satirical attacks on religion, while some see it as a defiant gesture in defense of free expression.
Among the cartoons, most of which were first published by a Danish newspaper in 2005 and then by Charlie Hebdo a year later, is one of Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse protruding. “We will never lie down. We will never give up,” editor Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau wrote in a piece to accompany the front cover that will be published in print Wednesday.
Twelve people, including some of the magazine’s best-known cartoonists, were killed when Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo and sprayed the building with automatic gunfire.
The Kouachi brothers and a third gunman who killed five people in the 48 hours that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre were shot dead by police in different standoffs, but 14 of their alleged accomplices go on trial Wednesday.
The trial had been delayed several months with most French courtrooms closed over the coronavirus pandemic. The trial in Paris will continue until Nov. 10 and, in a first for a terror trial, proceedings will be filmed for archival purposes given public interest.
