FRANCE | Charlie Hebdo publishing prophet cartoon on new cover

A police officer lays flowers at the site of the kosher market where four hostages were killed 

The surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo plans an unprecedented run of 3 million copies of the next issue today, with the Prophet Muhammad on the cover, as France hunts for other members of the terrorist cell involved in the attacks on the satirical weekly newspaper.
Late Monday, the website of the newspaper Liberation, which has been hosting the Charlie Hebdo staff, posted an image of the next cover of the satirical weekly. It featured a cartoon of Muhammad, with a tear streaming down his cheek, and holding a sign: “Je Suis Charlie” — “I Am Charlie.”
Overhead was the phrase: “All is forgiven.”
“Three million people will have Muhammad’s, the prophet’s drawing, at home,” Zineb El Rhazoui, a columnist for Charlie Hebdo, told the BBC yesterday. “We feel, as Charlie Hebdo’s team, that we need to forgive the two terrorists who have killed our colleagues.”
Earlier Monday, Charlie Hebdo lawyer Richard Malka told French radio that the new issue would “obviously” feature cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Charlie Hebdo’s past caricatures of the Muslim prophet appear to have prompted last week’s attacks, part of the worst terrorist rampage in France in decades.
Some witnesses reported that the attackers at the paper’s offices shouted “We have avenged the prophet.” Many Muslims believe all images of the prophet are blasphemous.
Two masked gunmen opened the onslaught in Paris with a Jan. 7 attack on the paper, singling out its editor and his police bodyguard for the first shots before killing 12 people in all. Ahmed Merabet, a French Muslim policeman, was one of the victims, killed as he lay wounded on the ground as the gunmen — brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi — made their escape.
Charlie Hebdo, which lampoons religion indiscriminately, had received threats after depicting Muhammed before, and its offices were firebombed in 2011. Its editor, Stephane Charbonnier, was under constant guard. Its surviving staff say they have been working feverishly since the attacks in loaned office space to put out the latest issue.
France’s main Muslim organization called yesterday for calm, fearing that a new Muhammad cartoon could inflame passions anew.
At police headquarters in Paris, French President Francois Hollande paid separate tribute yesterday to the three police officers killed in the attacks, placing Legion of Honor medals on their caskets.
“They died so that we could live free,” he said, flanked by hundreds of police officers.
Hollande vowed that France will be “merciless in the face of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslims acts, and unrelenting against those who defend and carry out terrorism, notably the jihadists who go to Iraq and Syria.”
As Chopin’s funeral march played in central Paris and the caskets draped in French flags were led from the building, a procession began in Jerusalem for the four Jewish victims of the attack Friday on a kosher supermarket in Paris.
“Returning to your ancestral home need not be due to distress, out of desperation, amidst destruction, or in the throes of terror and fear,” said Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. “Terror has never kept us down, and we do not want terror to subdue you. The Land of Israel is the land of choice. We want you to choose Israel, because of a love for Israel.”
French police say as many as six members of the terrorist cell that carried out the Paris attacks may still be at large, including a man seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen. The country has deployed 10,000 troops to protect sensitive sites, including Jewish schools and synagogues, mosques and travel hubs.
Amid the hunt for accomplices, Bulgarian authorities said yesterday they have a Frenchman under arrest who is believed to have links to Cherif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers.
Fritz-Joly Joachin, 29, was arrested Jan. 1 as he tried to cross into Turkey, under two European arrest warrants, one citing his alleged links to a terrorist organization and a second for allegedly kidnapping his 3-year-old son and smuggling him out of the country, said Darina Slavova, the regional prosecutor for Bulgaria’s southern province of Haskovo.
“He met with Kouachi several times at the end of December,” Slavova said.
The Kouachi brothers and their friend, Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages in the Paris grocery, died Friday in clashes with French police. All three claimed ties to Islamic extremists in the Middle East — the Kouachis to al-Qaida in Yemen and Coulibaly to the Islamic State group.
Two French police officials told The Associated Press that authorities were searching around Paris for the Mini Cooper registered to Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s widow, who Turkish officials say is now in Syria.
One of the police officials said the Paris terror cell consisted of about 10 members and that “five or six could still be at large,” but he did not provide their names. The other official said the cell was made up of about eight people and included Boumeddiene.
One of the police officials also said Coulibaly apparently set off a car bomb Thursday in the town of Villejuif, but no one was injured and it did not receive significant media attention.
Video has emerged of Coulibaly explaining how the attacks in Paris would unfold. French police want to find the person or persons who shot and posted the video, which was edited after Friday’s attacks.
Ties among the three attackers themselves date back to at least 2005, when Coulibaly and Cherif Kouachi were jailed together. AP

us says it should have sent high official to paris march

The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama or another high-level representative should have joined dozens of world leaders at an anti-terror rally in Paris, in a rare admission of error.
While leaders from Europe, the Middle East and Africa linked arms for Sunday’s march through the boulevards of Paris, the United States was represented by its ambassador to France. Attorney General Eric Holder was in Paris for security meetings but did not attend the march. “It’s fair to say we should have sent someone with a higher profile,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. The administration also announced that Secretary of State John Kerry, who was on a long-planned trip to India Sunday, will visit France later this week. The White House appeared to have been caught off guard by both the scope of international representation at the rally and by the criticism of the decision to send only Ambassador Jane Hartley. Monday’s admission of error seemed aimed at blunting criticism that the decision was tone deaf or disrespectful of the longstanding U.S. alliance with France.