12 dead in ‘terrorist attack’ at Paris weekly; shooters escape
Benoit Bringer, a journalist with Agence Premiere Ligne who witnessed the attack, said he saw several masked men armed with machine guns. President Hollande called it a terrorist attack.
PARIS—A French prosecutor says 12 people are dead in a shooting at a satirical weekly newspaper in central Paris and the attackers are still at large.
Four more people are in critical condition and an additional 20 have been injured, police said.
Paris was put on the highest state of alert for a terrorist attack.
“France is in a state of shock,” French President Francois Hollande said at the scene of Wednesday's shooting at Charlie Hebdo.
“Journalists and police were killed,” Holland said. “There are 11 people who died and four were between life and death.”
He called it “a terrorist attack, there is no doubt. We must show we are a country united.”
The French newspaper Le Figaro reported the satirical cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier, was among the seriously wounded. It said two police officers were among the dead.
A few minutes before the shooting, Charlie Hebdo’s Twitter account published a Charbonnier cartoon that said, “Best wishes, to al-Baghdadi also,” a reference to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who is called the leader of the violent terrorist group Islamic State.
Charlie Hebdo’s cover this week is on Submission, a book by Michel Houellebecq released Wednesday, which is sparking controversy with its depiction of a fictional France of the future led by an Islamic party and a Muslim president who bans women from the workplace.
The attackers are on the run, Holland said. He said all potential terrorist targets have been put under the highest protection, adding that several possible attacks have been foiled in recent weeks.
Most of the victims were part of the magazine’s newsroom, Matthieu Lamarre, a spokesman for the Paris Mayor’s office, said.
At least one of the dead is a police officer, he said.The satirical weekly has drawn repeated threats for its caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, among other controversial sketches.
In 2012, the weekly published caricaturesof the Prophet Muhammad after days of violent protests around the world against a U.S. produced film Innocence of Muslims that depicted the prophet as a fraud, a womanizer and a child molester.
In 2011, the Charlie Hebdo offices were fire bombed after its cartoon of the prophet that had been included in a special supplement published by a leading newspaper, Liberation, that carried the theme: “freedom to poke fun.”
The cartoon included the speech bubble: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.”
A Paris appeals court in 2008 had acquitted the weekly of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion” following a complaint by Muslim associations.
Luc Poignant, an official of the SBP police union, said the attackers escaped in two vehicles.
A witness to the attack Wednesday, Benoit Bringer, told the iTele network that he saw multiple masked men armed with automatic weapons at the newspaper.
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