French President Francois Hollande has insisted Charlie Hebdo and its values will survive, after the new edition of the satirical weekly sold out in hours.“Charlie Hebdo is alive and will live on,” Mr Hollande said.Millions more copies of the magazine are being printed because of demand.
It comes a week after Islamist gunmen murdered 12 people at its offices and five others in subsequent attacks. The new edition has angered some Muslims by depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The cartoon shows the Prophet weeping while holding a sign saying “I am Charlie”, and below the headline “All is forgiven”. “I am Charlie” emerged as a message of support for both the magazine and free speech following the attacks that started on 7 January. “You can murder men and women but you can never kill their ideas,” President Hollande said following the publication of the latest edition. He said the magazine had been “reborn” in the week after the killings.
It will have a print run of five million issues this week, dwarfing the normal circulation of about 60,000. The “survivors’ issue”, as the magazine calls it, is available in six languages including English, Arabic and Turkish. Proceeds are going to victims’ families.
Eight journalists, including its editor, were killed in addition to four others when two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris on 7 January. In a separate attack in the city two days later, an Islamist gunman killed four Jewish men and took hostages at a kosher shop. The same attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, is believed to have shot a policewoman the day before.
