Charlie Hebdo magazine will republish the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that inspired a brutal terror attack against its office more than five years ago.
Trials for the alleged co-conspirators in that attack are set to begin on Wednesday. The new edition of the magazine will be published that same day.
On Jan. 7, 2015, the French satirical magazine was targeted by two Islamic extremists over a cartoon drawing of the Prophet Muhammad, which the magazine had published in 2006.
Two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, showered its newsroom with gunfire on Jan. 7, 2015. Twelve people were killed. Authorities tracked the pair down and cornered them on July 9.
On July 8, Amedy Coulibaly, an acquaintance of Cherif Kouachi, killed a female police officer, and on Jan. 9, he took hostages and killed four Jewish men, demanding that the Kouachi brothers be allowed to go free.
The Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly were killed in separate showdowns with authorities. The upcoming trial will focus on 14 of their alleged accomplices.
The magazine has insisted that ever since the violence in January 2015, they refuse to be intimidated into silence.
“We will never lie down. We will never give up,” editor Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau wrote in a piece for the upcoming issue. The cover will display a cartoon of Muhammad drawn by Jean Cabut, one of the men killed during the attacks. “All of this, just for that,” the front-page headline will read.
“We have often been asked since January 2015 to print other caricatures of Muhammad,” the publication’s editorial team wrote. “We have always refused to do so, not because it is prohibited — the law allows us to do so — but because there was a need for a good reason to do it, a reason which has meaning and which brings something to the debate.”
The team has called the republishing of the images “essential.”
