Less than a week after a Russian Airbus A321 broke up mid-air over Egypt’s Sinai peninsula – killing all 224 people on board – the explicit cartoons, which Charlie Hebdo reportedly published in its latest edition and quickly did the rounds on social media, have struck Russians hard.
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The second cartoon, in colour, shows a skull amidst gore and debris of a crashed plane with the caption – “The Dangers of Russian low-priced Airlines”, “I should’ve flown Air Cocaine”, reports Huffington Post.
But after this week’s cartoon Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Facebook page: “Is anyone else still Charlie?”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov denounced the cartoons as “unacceptable” and said “many” Russians “felt insulted” by the French satirical sketches.
One cartoon making the rounds showed a devil-like creature roasting Charlie Hebdo staffers in a cauldron over a fire fuelled by copies of the magazine.
Mr Peskov said: “This has no relation to democracy, nor to the right of freedom of expression”.
Russian officials have blasted the cartoons as offensive, insensitive and “blasphemous”. Charlie Hebdo’s drawings of a Russian aircraft accident in that killed 224 on October 31 – an conspicuous act of terrorism – have been referred to as “pure blasphemy” by Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin.
“My colleagues and I tried to find caricatures of the Charlie Hebdo journalists in the magazine who were shot by terrorists”.
Commenting on the caricature, Federation Council foreign affairs committee member Igor Morozov said that it is blasphemy and mockery of the memory of the crash victims. “But if they were published, then it would also be blasphemy, well at least in our country”, he added.
The cause of the crash has not yet been determined, but United States and British officials fear a bomb might have blown up the plane in midair.
The magazine’s office was the target of a jihadist terrorist attack in January in which 12 people died.
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Others say that Charlie Hebdo is again fishing for attention on order to boost the selling of their magazine.
