On January 7 past year, Islamist militants stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, killing 12 people in the resultant violence.
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A month before the attack, Charlie Hebdo was close to shutting down as sales had dipped below 30,000.
The cover image of the special edition, which will be available in France on Wednesday, features a bearded man representing God holding a Kalashnikov rifle. Other police cornered the escaped Charlie Hebdo gunmen in a printing plant north of Paris and killed them that same afternoon.
The publication will release a special edition this week with a characteristically provocative cover. “One year after, the assassin continues to be on the run”, the headline says.
It also features an editorial by current editor Laurent Sourisseau – who was seriously wounded in the attacks – defending secularism and praising the magazine for “daring to laugh at the religious”. A million copies of the anniversary edition in that includes a set of cartoons by 5 of the magazine’s cartoonists killed within the attack might be distributed on the market in French newsagents, with hundreds more exported on the market overseas. He denounces “fanatics brutalised by the Koran” as well people from other religions who had hoped the attacks would bring about the demise of the publication.
Religion has always been a target of the satirical paper’s controversial commentary, and Muslim groups have criticized it in the past for depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
“You can die doing it”.
The attack was claimed by al Qaeda’s branch in the Arabian Peninsula, known as AQAP. In 2011, its offices were firebombed and it was forced to move premises.
Nearly all of those believed directly responsible for the January 7-9 attacks and the November 13 carnage in Paris that killed 130 people are dead as well.
On Sunday, a more public ceremony is planned at Place de la Republique, the square in eastern Paris that attracted mass rallies in favor of free speech and democratic values after the attacks and became an informal memorial.
Survivors, witnesses and the families and loved ones of the victims have been invited to attend alongside city officials.
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Hollande will preside over the ceremony, during which a 10-metre-high commemorative oak tree will be planted.
