Je suis Charlie: Five years onAs Trial Begins in Paris for Charlie Hebdo Attack, the Magazine Republishes Cartoons of Mohammed

Yesterday (Wednesday, 2 September 2020), the trial of fourteen people, accused of participating in the plot to attack the editorial offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015, begins in a Paris court. The fourteen men are charged with involvement in a series of deadly terrorist attacks in the city, which began in the offices of the magazine and ended at a kosher supermarket two days later.

Seventeen people were killed in the attacks.

The suspects are accused of having provided logistical support to the perpetrators — brothers Said and Chérif Kouachi, and their accomplice Amedy Coulibaly.

Eleven of the suspects will appear in court — 10 of them from behind bulletproof glass. Three others, who traveled to Syria in the days before the attacks began, will be tried in absentia.

The trial, which is being held amid tight security at Paris’ Criminal Court, is expected to last nearly two months, with 144 witnesses called to give evidence.

As the trial of the January 2015 attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish grocery store Hypercacher opens today, Charlie Hebdo is reposting the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad who had made the satirical weekly a target of jihadists.

“We’ll never go to bed. We will never give up,”says Laurent (“Riss”) Sourisseau, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, in this week’s issue — on the newsstands today; also available online — which includes the cartoons of Mohammed printed five years ago. The Islamist terrorists who broke into the magazine’s office in January 2015 and killed twelve of its staff, left messages that they saw these cartoons as insulting to their Prophet, and that their attack was their revenge for that blasphemy.

“The hatred that struck us is still there and, since 2015, it has taken the time to adapt and change its appearance, to go unnoticed and to quietly continue its ruthless crusade,” said Riss.

The eleven cartoons, or drawings, of Mohammed which Charlie Hebdo published in January 2015 were originally published in 2005 in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005, then republished by Charlie Hebdo in 2006. One of the drawings showed the Prophet carrying a bomb on his head instead of a turban. Another cartoon shows the Prophet as a menacing figure armed with a knife and flanked by two veiled women veiled in black hijabs.

In addition to the eleven original Danish caricatures, the cover of this week’s Charlie Hebdo,