Arson attack on French satirical paper condemned
A police official said the blaze broke out overnight at the offices of Charlie Hebdo weekly, and the exact cause remains unclear. No injuries were reported. Police cited a witness saying that someone was seen throwing two firebombs at the building.
The newspaper’s director, who goes by the name Charb, said the fire was triggered by a Molotov cocktail. He blamed “radical stupid people who don’t know what Islam is”, for the apparent attack.
“I think that they are themselves unbelievers... idiots who betray their own religion,” Charb said.
French prime minister Francois Fillon called on the authorities to find those responsible and bring them to justice. “Freedom of expression is an inalienable value of our democracy. No cause can justify a violent action.”
The front page of the weekly, subtitled “Sharia Hebdo”, a reference to Islamic law, showed a cartoon of a man with a turban, white robe and beard smiling broadly and saying, in an accompanying bubble, “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing”.
The president of an umbrella group representing France’s Muslim community — at some 5 million the largest in western Europe — also condemned the attack.
Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, said his organisation also deplores “the very mocking tone of the paper toward Islam and its prophet, but reaffirms with force its total opposition to all acts and all forms of violence”.
Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favourable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.
Charb said the current issue, which appeared on newsstands yesterday morning — after the fire — was centred on last week’s victory of a once-banned Islamist party in Tunisia’s first free elections and last month’s decision by Libya’s new leaders that Sharia, or Islamic legislation, will be the main source of law in post-Gadaffi Libya.
“It was a joke where the topic was to imagine a world where Sharia would be applied,” Charb said. “But since everyone tells us not to worry about Libya or Tunisia, we wanted to explain what would be a soft version of Sharia, a Sharia applied in a soft manner.”
A police official said the fire was quickly contained, but a large part of new offices on two levels were heavily damaged and equipment used to produce the paper was inoperable.
The director vowed to continue publishing and Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe said the city would help the publication find a new office space.
Technicians from the police lab began their investigation several hours after the fire, taking fingerprints and various samples. Newspaper employees said they had received numerous threats as a result of the issue.
Page two of the issue is made up of a series of cartoons featuring women in burqas. And the paper’s tongue-in-cheek editorial, signed “Muhammad”, follows on page three, centred on the victory of Tunisia’s Islamist Ennahda party in the nation’s first free election, and saying the party’s real intention is imposing Islam not democracy.
Each page contains “a word from Muhammad” in the corner and spoofs the news by twisting it into the weekly’s current theme. On the last page, a turbaned and bearded man with a clown-like red nose says: “Yes, Islam is compatible with humour.”
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