Charlie Hebdo Attack

On the 7th January, a black Citroen C3 drove up to the Charlie Hebdo building in Rue Nicolas-Appert. Two masked gunmen, dressed in black and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles got out and burst into number 6 Rue Nicolas-Appert, which was not where Charlie Hebdo is based. After realising this, the attackers then went into number 10 in which their offices were on the second floor. They managed to make their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices and killing in total 12 people throughout the whole attack, this included eight journalists, two police officers, a caretaker and a visitor, witnesses said the two were shouting "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad" and "God is Great" in Arabic while calling out the names of the journalists. The attackers then escaped in their car, before stopping and shooting dead a police officer, before ditching the car and hijacking another, then disappearing. Investigators found Molotov cocktails and two jihadist flags in the car, which was stated in a French media report.
On the 8th January, as police continued their search for the Charlie Hebdo attackers, a lone gunman armed with a machine-gun and pistol, shot dead a policewoman and injured a man before fleeing. A second attack happened on the 8th of July as the two Hebdo suspects robbed a service station armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They fired shots as they stole petrol and food from the service station. They then led police on a chase around  north-eastern France, before seeking refuge in a printworks in Dammartin-en-goele, after one of the two had been hit in the neck from a police bullet. Police surrounded the building with snipers, helicopters and special force officers.
Then on Friday 9th January, the two after telling local news papers that they would die "martys" deaths, ran out of the bulding shooting at the police. Both suspects were killed and two police officers were injured. Meanwhile in Paris another siege was underway, from the lone suspect who killed the policewoman and injured a man. The gunman took several people hostage at a kosher supermarket in the east of paris. The man was threatening to kill people unless the 'charlie hebdo' attackers were allowed to go free (who were still in the printworks). Special forces burst into the supermarket, shooting the gunman dead and freeing 15 hostages from the store. But they also found the bodies of four hostages.

But why did the terrorists pick Charlie Hebdo?

Charlie Hebdo is a French weekly newspaper that features cartoon, reports, polemics and jokes. They use a non-conformist tone, is stronlgly secularist, antireligious and left-wing. They also publish articles that mock far-right politics, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Israel, politics, culture, and various other groups as local and world news unfolds. Basically Charlie Hebdo, uses comedy to highlight and sometimes mock different news stories from around the world that are happening at that time. The company has a history of attracting controversy. In 2006, Islamic organisations under French hate speech laws unsuccessfully sued over the newspapers re-publication of a cartoon that featured a cartoon of Muhammed. In 2011the cover featured another cartoon of Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden in some interpretations of Islam. Later that year the the office was fire-bombed and its website hacked. Cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier who was the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo from 2009, found himself along with three other staff members on te al-Qaeda most wanted list. This was also the reason why Charbonnier had a police bodyguard present with him on the day of the attack. Numerous other failed attacks happened to Charlie Hebdo before the fatal shooting on 7th January 2015. It seems as if Islamic extremists had Charlie Hebdo in their crosshares for a number of years before this attack, which was down to them publishing cartoons of Prophit Mohammed, and in their minds making a joke of Islam.

In the whole I feel this attack was an attack on freedom of speech, and fascist organisations trying to control it for their benefit. I feel that I'm going to base my project on the idea of 'freedom of speech', although at the moment I'm not sure how im going to represent this in a photographic medium.