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Charlie Hebdo attack



Charlie Hebdo attacks: ‘It’s carnage, a bloodbath. Everyone is dead’









Paris magazine staff say gunman knew their targets in advance and entered the building like ‘an organised commando’ raid


Charlie Hebdo attack: follow the latest developments

















Armed gunmen face police officers near the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in Paris. Photograph: Anne Gelbard/AFP/Getty Images




Jon Henley, and 
Kim Willsher in Paris


Wednesday 7 January 2015 17.45 EST







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Eleven-thirty am, in Paris. Corinne Rey, known as Coco, a cartoonist who works for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, had just picked up her daughter from a nearby creche. “When I got to the front door of the magazine’s building with her, two masked and armed men threatened us – violently,” she said. “They wanted to get inside, go upstairs. I tapped in the entrance code … They spoke perfect French. They said they were from al-Qaida.”
The offices of Charlie Hebdo are at No 10 rue Nicolas Appert, one of an anonymous row of low-rise, low-rent buildings, their cracked cream facades splashed with patches of fresher paint covering the graffiti that are everywhere in this slightly scruffy corner of the 11th arrondissement.
The gunmen Rey admitted had been dropped off outside, carrying Kalashnikovs, by a third man in a black Citroën – registration number CW 518 XV – with dark-tinted windows. They knew their business, police said: they wore balaclavas and bulletproof vests; they held their weapons professionally; they “moved calmly and appeared determined”.
They chose their moment, too. Wednesday morning is publication day for Charlie Hebdo, the occasion for the staff’s weekly editorial conference. Inside the second-floor conference room, some 15 staff members – cartoonists, editors, writers – had gathered for the mid-morning meeting, including four of the magazine’s most famous names: the cartoonists Cabu, Wolinski and Tignous, and the magazine’s editor since 2012, the cartoonist Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb.



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Stéphane Charbonnier was one of the journalists killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Photograph: Baltel/Sipa/Rex/Baltel/Sipa/Rex


But witnesses to the bloodbath that was about to ensue said that once inside the building, the attackers seemed at first unsure where to go. According to tweets from Yves Cresson, who works for the media production company Bayoo next door to Charlie Hebdo, the two attackers initially walked into his offices.
“At 11.25am, taking advantage of the postwoman, two armed men wearing balaclavas entered our offices,” he tweeted. “They were looking for Charlie.” Cresson said the men fired two bullets, which passed through a door and a window.
One witness told Libération they asked a receptionist which floor Charlie Hebdo’s offices were on. An unnamed woman who worked in an office on the second floor, across the corridor from Charlie Hebdo, told France Info radio that she and her colleagues had first heard “a big bang. Then someone just threw open the door to our office, in one move, and demanded to know where Charlie Hebdo was. He had a rifle. We backed away. After he left, we heard gunfire. We went to the windows: there were two men running, with guns … They were shouting outside, and shooting again.”
An anti-terrorism police source told Libération that the men gave every appearance of being “calm and determined … They clearly knew their target in advance”. Once inside the magazine’s offices, the source said, “they went straight to the conference room. They looked round the room and said, ‘Where’s Charb? Where’s Charb?’ They killed him, and then they sprayed the rest of the room with gunfire.” He said he did not rule out there having been other names on the target list of what was “an organised commando”.



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A man holds a drawing during a vigil for victims of the shootings, at Place de la République in Paris.
Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images


It was Laurent Léger, a Charlie Hebdo writer, who managed to sound the alarm, according to a reporter from L’Obs magazine. Léger was in the conference room as the attackers opened fire and managed to make a phone call at 11.40. “He told the friend, ‘Call the police. It’s carnage, a bloodbath. Everyone is dead.’ Then the line went dead.”
Ten members of Charlie Hebdo’s staff had been shot dead, the Paris prosecutor’s office would later confirm. Rocco Contente, of the Paris branch of the police union Unité, described the scene inside the office as “butchery. It’s carnage inside. They went in there to kill as many people as possible”.
A 27-year-old witness identified only as Samy, who lives in a third-floor flat immediately across the street from No 10, told L’Obs that he “heard explosions”. He said: “At first, I thought it was just bangers. I went to my window and I realised they were gunshots. First outside, and then more, resonating in some kind of enclosed space. I saw two masked, hooded men, dressed in dark clothing and armed with Kalashnikovs come out, running, into the rue Gaby-Sylvia. I was in a state of shock. I saw someone coming out, injured, covered in blood.”
Elsewhere on the street, there was terror. Fradji Guez said his four-month-old granddaughter Joanne was in the nursery near the Charlie Hebdo offices at the time of the attack. “The staff heard the shooting and were so frightened that they hid the children under the cots,” he said. “Of course, they didn’t know where the shooting was coming from. They were utterly terrified. My daughter-in-law phoned me beside herself and in tears. I had to go and get my granddaughter to reassure her she was safe. It’s horrific.”



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A woman lights a candle during a vigil in Lyon following an attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Photograph: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images


Sprinting out of the building, weapons in hand, the two attackers reportedly ran straight into a police car pulling up outside. There was an exchange of fire. Two policemen died; one, aged 42, from the 11th arrondissement, was calmly shot in the head at point-blank range while lying injured on the ground on boulevard Richard Lenoir. The second, officials confirmed, was Charb’s 49-year-old bodyguard, an experienced officer from the VIP protection squad. A third policeman was seriously injured in the leg.
One neighbour saw paramedics trying to save an injured police officer on the road outside her office. “It was ghastly, awful,” she said. “We knew it was serious because they weren’t even trying to take him away to hospital. They were just trying to save him right there in the street. We are all in shock.”
As the attackers jumped into the waiting Citroën, several witnesses reported hearing shouts of “Allahu Akbar”, as well as “We’ve killed Charlie Hebdo” and “We have avenged the prophet”.
Driving away at high speed, the Citroën ran down a pedestrian, also reported to be in a serious condition. The attackers made it as far as the junction of rue Sadi-Lecointe and rue de Meaux, in the 19th arrondissement not far from the Place de Stalingrad, before abandoning the now damaged car. Cedric Le Bechec, 33, an estate agent, saw what happened next.



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French police stand next to funeral hearse in front of the entrance of the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo.
Photograph: Francois Mori/AP


“It all happened very calmly, with no shouting, no insults,” he told the freesheet 20 Minutes. On his way out of an appointment in rue de Meaux, Le Bechec watched as two men jumped out of “a small black car” carrying a rocket launcher. “The car was stopped in the middle of the street. Two big black guys dressed in military-style gear got out. 
“They pulled a man, around 60, out of the car behind, a grey Renault Clio. They climbed in and said, ‘You can tell the media we’re from al-Qaida in Yemen.’ I was five or 10 metres away. The guy said, ‘Wait, let me have my dog!’ They let him get his dog out of the car before they drove off. The police arrived five minutes later.”
Shortly before midday, Paris police confirmed they had lost all trace of the attackers. Roadblocks were mounted on all main roads leading out of Paris and French media reported police were “confident” that the attackers had gone to ground somewhere in the city. Barely an hour afterwards, visiting the scene of the country’s worst atrocity in decades, a visibly shocked French president, François Hollande, described it as “a terrorist attack, without a doubt”. The attack was “an act of exceptional barbarism”, he said.
Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, confirmed the provisional toll from the attack as 12 dead and 11 wounded, including four seriously. More than 30 public gatherings were planned around France. More than 500 police officers were on duty across Paris.
The Charlie Hebdo offices were last attacked barely three years ago, after the irreverent and often controversial weekly, first founded in the wake of France’s 1968 student revolt and resurrected in its present incarnation in 1992, put another cartoon of the Muslim prophet on its cover – since when, in principle, it has been under police protection. 



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Police and rescue forces are seen near the scene of the shooting.
Photograph: Christian Hartmann/Reuters


It first came to international attention in 2006, when its decision to reprint a selection of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, sparked outrage across the Muslim world.
The magazine courts controversy; at Wednesday’s meeting, its staff almost certainly discussed the cover of that morning’s issue, which featured the enfant terrible of French literature, Michel Houellebecq. His sixth and most recent novel, Soumission – or Submission – is published this week and imagines France in 2022, run by a Muslim president and according to the laws of conservative Islam. Someone on the staff had just tweeted its new year’s greetings to its followers, “including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi”: a cartoon drawing of the Islamic State leader wishing everyone “the best of health”.
A reporter at the magazine, Antonio Fischetti, who was not in the building on Wednesday, said the paper had lived with a threat over its head for several years. “We knew the threat was real,” he told Libération. “But it wasn’t complete paranoia. Threats against Charlie were recurrent, continual, habitual. There hadn’t been that many recently, but vigilance had been lowered a bit. After the 2011 fire, there was a police car outside in the street, at first all the time, then just during the editorial conference on Wednesdays. But for a little while now, a month or two, it hadn’t been there. They must have noticed that. They really waited for the right moment. Charb had his bodyguards, even when he came to dinner at mine. We thought Charb could be targeted.”
Gael Fabiano, spokesperson for the police union UNSA-Police, said the killers appeared to have planned the attack well and described them as “cold-blooded”. He said the police were “confronting a new form of violence, and we have to adapt to that. We have to have the means to act. The police were already at Charlie Hebdo to protect it from such an attack, but these terrorists acted with such determination and cold-bloodedness, what could they do? These terrorists were armed with weapons of war. How can our 9mm pistol defend us from people armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers?”
Charlie Hebdo attack: follow the latest developments



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more on this story














Cherif Kouachi during 2008 terror trial: 'I've been set up' - video

File footage of one of the Paris gunmen, Cherif Kouachi, arriving at court in 2008 on charges of helping to funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency



Published: 13 Jan 2015




Cherif Kouachi during 2008 terror trial: 'I've been set up' - video












Analysis Charlie Hebdo attackers: born, raised and radicalised in Paris

The radicalisation of the Kouachi brothers began in a picturesque park in the capital while Amédy Coulibaly took the first steps towards terrorism in prison, but what the three had in common was growing up on the margins of French society



Published: 12 Jan 2015




Charlie Hebdo attackers: born, raised and radicalised in Paris












Paris shootings: investigation launched into where gunmen got GoPro cameras

Officials try to pinpoint when and where cameras found in possession of Kouachi brothers and Amédy Coulibaly were obtained



Published: 12 Jan 2015




Paris shootings: investigation launched into where gunmen got GoPro cameras












Paris attacks: 10,000 troops deployed as France hunts for accomplices

Mobilisation of 10,000 troops to guard potentially vulnerable locations comes as prime minister warns that ‘threat still present’



Published: 12 Jan 2015




Paris attacks: 10,000 troops deployed as France hunts for accomplices














Paris shootings: Jewish school ‘likely target’ of gunman Coulibaly




Published: 12 Jan 2015




Paris shootings: Jewish school ‘likely target’ of gunman Coulibaly








Analysis Mentor of Charlie Hebdo gunmen has been UK-based




Published: 11 Jan 2015




Mentor of Charlie Hebdo gunmen has been UK-based








Paris gunman Amedy Coulibaly declared allegiance to Isis




Published: 11 Jan 2015




Paris gunman Amedy Coulibaly declared allegiance to Isis








Charlie Hebdo: a letter to my British friends

Olivier Tonneau




Published: 13 Jan 2015




Charlie Hebdo: a letter to my British friends
















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