Updated Jan. 7, 2024 at 10:20 a.m.
On this day in 2015, two gunmen opened fire at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, targeting the magazine's staff for satirizing Islam.
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What happened in the Charlie Hebdo attacks?
Two Islamist gunmen forced their way into the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly newspaper and opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring 11. The two Kouachi brothers who carried out the attack would eventually be killed in a police shootout outside of the capital two days later.
Why was Charlie Hebdo attacked?
The magazine had attracted considerable worldwide attention for its controversial cartoons of Muhammad. Hatred for the paper’s cartoons, which made jokes about Islamic leaders including the Prophet Muhammad, is considered to be the principal motive for the massacre. In Islam, it is forbidden to depict Muhammad.
What was the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks?
Two days after the attack, as the police closed in on the Charlie Hebdo suspects, their accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly murdered four Jewish hostages and held fifteen other hostages during a siege of a kosher supermarket in Paris.
On Jan. 11 about two million people marched in Paris in a rally of national unity. The staff of Charlie Hebdo continued with the publication. The following issue had almost eight million copies in six languages, compared to its typical print run of 60,000 in French.