Charlie Hebdo declares: "The murderer is still at large"
PARIS - In a special edition laced with blasphemy, obscenity and profanity, Charlie Hebdo's surviving artists and writers declared that the satirical newspaper is alive, but "the murderer is still at large."
The 32-page copy marking the anniversary of the Jan. 7 attack on the paper's staff accuses Islamic fundamentalists, organized religion, an irresolute government and intelligence failures for the 2015 violence in France by Muslim extremists that started with that day.
Seventeen people died at Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket two days later. They were among the first victims of a string of attacks by Islamic fundamentalists in France last year that ultimately left at least 147 people dead and hundreds of others injured.
Almost all of those believed directly responsible for the Jan. 7-9 attacks and the Nov. 13 carnage in Paris that killed 130 people are dead as well. But Charlie Hebdo's special edition this week, with a front-page caricature of a bloody God wielding an assault rifle, darkly predicts that more violence is to come.
Laurent Sourisseau, the newspaper's director who goes by the name Riss, drew the cover and wrote an editorial describing the horror he survived - and that took the lives of friends and colleagues. He described the newsroom's silence moments after the two gunmen opened fire, saying that was how he knew his colleagues were dead.
But Riss said the newspaper would remain alive because "never have we wanted so much to break the faces of those who dreamed of our deaths."
In a separate piece, chief editor Gerard Biard marveled that no one bothered to explain to the world why the attackers went after the supermarket.
"We are so used to Jews being killed because they are Jewish," he wrote. "This is an error, and not just on a human level. Because it's the executioner who decides who is Jewish. Nov. 13 was the proof of that. On that day, the executioner showed us that he had decided we were all Jewish."