French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo will mark a year since the jihadist attack on its offices with a cover featuring a bloodied, gun-toting, bearded God figure, under the headline: “One year on: The assassin still at large”.
One million copies of the special edition will go on sale in France Wednesday, on the eve of the first anniversary of the killing of 12 people at the magazine’s Paris offices by brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi.
Eight Charlie Hebdo staff were among the victims of the January 7, 2015 assault which brought millions of people onto France`s streets in protest and transformed a fading publication into a global symbol of freedom of expression.
A total of 17 people were killed in three days of attacks that also targeted a Jewish supermarket and police, marking the start of a string of jihadist strikes in France that culminated in November`s massacre in Paris.Charlie Hebdo`s offices had been firebombed in 2011 and other magazines in Europe which published Mohammed cartoons had also been threatened, but the brazen attack in Paris shocked the world.
Le Monde described the attack, which was claimed by Al-Qaeda`s branch in the Arabian Peninsula as revenge for Charlie`s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, as “France`s 9/11”.
Within hours of the shootings, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie went viral, rallying millions behind the plight of a publication that had nearly shut down a month earlier because of a lack of readers.
As police scoured the capital for the killers, Amedy Coulibaly, a radicalised Frenchman claiming to be working with the Kouachis, killed a policewoman.
The next day, he took shoppers hostage at a Jewish supermarket, killing four people before police stormed the building and shot him dead.
The Kouachi brothers were killed in a simultaneous shootout with police, north of Paris.
On Sunday, November 11, in a grieving Paris, President Francois Hollande led an anti-terror march that drew dozens of world leaders, from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.A further four million people rallied across France in a display of unity not seen since the liberation from Nazi tyranny in 1944.
