Paris Police Thwart Attack on 'Charlie Hebdo' Anniversary
- Lisa Bryant
- Jan 7, 2016
- 3 min read
French police patrol near the Boulevard de Barbes in the north of Paris on Jan. 7, 2016, after police shot a man dead as he was trying to enter a police station in the nearby Rue de la Goutte d'Or.
PARIS—French officers shot dead an armed man who apparently tried to attack a police station in northern Paris Thursday, as France marked the year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo shootings.
The man reportedly wielded a butcher knife and a fake suicide vest, as he tried to enter the building crying "Allah Akbar," or God is Great in Arabic. He was shot dead by police, who later said the explosives were fake.
The Paris prosecutor said the man, identified as Sallah Ali, had also been carrying a mobile phone and sheet of paper bearing the Islamic State flag and claims of responsibility by the militant group written in Arabic.
Coming just minutes after French President Francois Hollande paid tribute to police in last year’s attacks, the incident in the tough, immigrant-heavy Goutte d’Or neighborhood offers a grim reminder that the country remains at high risk of more strikes.
Charlie Hebdo commemorations
It also came with a weeklong deluge of commemorations, debates and documentaries covering three days of mayhem that began January 7, 2015. The events culminate Sunday with a daylong memorial for the nearly 150 victims of both the January and November attacks that bookended last year.
Between the two events were several others, including the decapitation of a French man near Lyon by Islamist Yassin Salhi, and a foiled attack on a Thalys train.
“We need to realize that we’re in a state of total war,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told the Le Parisien newspaper in an interview published before Thursday’s incident, “which implies we need to do everything to dismantle [terrorist] networks, prevent them from striking, find political and diplomatic solutions, support our security and intelligence forces."
“But always,” he added, “with the same compass: a state of law.”
Earlier in the week, authorities unveiled new plaques honoring the 17 people killed by Islamist brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi who targeted the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, and Amedy Coulibaly who laid siege to a Jewish grocery store.
Charlie Hebdo magazine marks the first anniversary of a deadly assault on its offices with a special edition. Its cover headline says: ‘The assassin still at large.
Anniversary edition The irreverent French weekly has since bounced back, publishing one million copies of a saucy anniversary edition on Wednesday that, in true form, managed to both amuse and outrage. Its cover — portraying God as a gun-wielding terrorist with the headline: “The Assassin is still out there” — drew a rebuke from the Vatican.
The Hyper Casher market, where four people were killed on January 9, 2015, is also back in business.
But in ways big and small, France is a very different nation than one year ago.
State of emergency remains A state of emergency, enacted after the November 13 attacks that killed 130 people around the capital, is still in place. Soldiers still patrol sensitive sites and police continue to carry out dozens of raids, detaining and questioning suspects — but also, critics maintain, unfairly profiling Muslims — under broad new emergency powers.
People mourn in front of the screened-off facade of the Bataclan Cafe adjoining the concert hall, one of the sites of the deadly attacks in Paris, France, a day before a ceremony to pay tribute to the 130 victims, Nov. 26, 2015.
Anti-Muslim acts have skyrocketed and anti-immigrant sentiment have sharpened. Many Parisians now think twice about taking public transport or going out to dinner, fearful of more violence to come.
On Thursday, Hollande paid his respects to France’s police force which lost three members in last January’s attacks. They died, the French president said, “so we could live.”
French President Francois Hollande shakes hands to police officers at the Paris' police headquarters, Jan. 7, 2016, one year after the attack targeting the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Debate is raging over the Socialist government’s proposal to write the current emergency measures into the French constitution. Most controversial is Hollande’s call for stripping convicted terrorists of their French nationality which has drawn outcry by rights groups and deeply split the left.
“For us, it’s definitely no!” wrote a group of organizations, including the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights, which are campaigning against the tougher measures. “No to stripping French nationality, no to democracy under a state of emergency, no to a constitutional reform imposed without debate,” wrote the group.
A recent poll however found nearly nine out of 10 French support the plan to revoke citizenship, with most believing it did not contradict leftist values.
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