French President Francois Hollande is leading a ceremony to commemorate the victims of last year’s Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks and the a wave of attacks across Paris last November. The country is under a state of emergency after attacks November 13, and a police station was attacked Thursday by a man whose background is still unclear.
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Neither Hollande or Hidalgo spoke at the ceremony, but veteran French rock star Johnny Hallyday, accompanied only by a guitar, sang a song about the march on January 11 previous year, which brought out the biggest crowds in Paris since the liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany in 1944.
Twelve people were killed in the January 7 2015 assault on Charlie Hebdo, which had been in the jihadists’ sights since publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2006.
Shot dead by Amedy Coulibaly near a Jewish school in Montrouge, on the outskirts of Paris, she may have foiled a plan by the gunman to attack children.
One of those who attended the commemoration, Jacques Clayeux, a 54-year-old museum technician, had known one of the murdered cartoonists, Tignous.
People stand next to banner reading “je suis Paris”, “I am Paris” on the Place de la Republique during a gathering that marks one year after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper, in Paris, France, Thursday, Jan. 7, 2016.
“Everyone grew up with those guys”, he said.
The one-year anniversary on Thursday of the Charlie Hebdo shootings was overshadowed when a man was killed by police as he approached a police station in northern Paris wielding a meat cleaver and wearing what later turned out to be a fake explosives vest.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the assailant shot dead on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks gave his nationality as Tunisian and carried a paper marked with the Muslim declaration of faith, an emblem of the Islamic State group, and a name.
Molins went on to say anti-terrorist authorities were working on 215 cases involving 711 individuals in France. In that encounter, he provided a certain name and claimed to be Moroccan.
Meanwhile, hundreds of French mosques are opening their doors to the public for a few days in an effort to educate non-Muslims about their culture, at a time when Islamic extremist attacks have fostered negative impressions of the faith.
“The office’s anti-terror section will determine the identity of the attacker and his motivations”, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said at a press conference, at the French Capitol.
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France has the highest Muslim population of Western Europe.
