The main suspect in the knife attack on people near the former building of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was motivated by anger over the reprint of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Reported by leParisien.
It is noted that Pakistani Ali H., born in 2002, has now been arrested. It is known that he pleaded guilty, saying that he was deeply outraged by the cartoons. “He confirmed that he thought he was at the Charlie building, and the people he attacked were working in a satirical magazine,” a law enforcement source in Paris said. It is now being established whether Ali acted on the call of the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, banned in Russia, or not.
On September 25, it was reported that two men with knives staged an attack near the former Charlie Hebdo building. As a result of the attack, four people were injured, the police regarded the incident as a terrorist attack.
On September 12, al-Qaeda threatened Charlie Hebdo with another attack for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The weekly on September 2 reissued 12 cartoons (according to the number of those killed in the attack on the editorial office in 2015), explaining that “these drawings have become history, and history can neither be rewritten nor erased”.
On January 7, 2015, the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, which was then located in the said building, was attacked by three armed men. The terrorist attack killed 12 people, including 10 employees of the publication. Later, all the attackers were destroyed. The reason for the attack was the publication on the cover of the magazine of a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. Responsibility for organizing and carrying out the shooting at the editorial office was assumed by the leader of the Yemeni al-Qaeda cell, Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi. In July 2015, Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief and publisher Laurent Surisso announced that the publication would no longer publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
