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Post by Admin on Jan 7, 2015 23:01:29 GMT
Out of the horror came something beautiful. Not all of the people who traveled to London’s Trafalgar Square, or attended similar vigils in other cities and countries throughout Europe, could explain why they felt impelled to come. They just knew that they wanted to stand together, not only to protest the slaughter at the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, but in some way to continue the work of the French satirical newspaper. Its editors, writers and most famously its cartoonists had regularly challenged those who sought to stifle freedom of expression. As the news of the attack spread, the hashtag #jesuischarlie—”I am Charlie”—became a declaration of solidarity, and the vigils organized and publicized on social media offered a way to make that declaration substantial. “I saw the pictures on television,” says Marie Proffit, a Frenchwoman working in London as an arts project manager, “and I needed to do something with these feelings.” Her English friend Leanne Hammacott, who works at the Cultural Institute at King’s College London, pointed her to Facebook pages calling for people to assemble in Trafalgar Square. By 6.30 PM they met up with each other and another friend, Tina Westiner, a German designer also based in the city. They stood in near-silence in a crowd of several hundreds under Nelson’s Column, the 19th century memorial to the British Admiral Horatio Nelson, who died fighting the French and the Spanish. But on this evening history bound rather than divided. Members of the crowd held up pens—mightier than the sword—and flowers and placards: “Je Suis Charlie.” Less than a minute away at 10 Downing Street, the leaders of two European countries who have not always seen eye-to-eye also focused on common ground. Germany has taken on the 2015 presidency of the G7 group of nations and its Chancellor Angela Merkel had arrived in the U.K. on Jan. 7 to meet with British Prime Minister David Cameron. On the agenda was a weighty palette of issues, from the fight against Ebola to the stuttering economy and the sharpening crisis in the euro zone—and of the European Union itself. The E.U. evolved from a project designed to create peace. But these days the union is increasingly a source of friction, between countries and within them. Conflict has returned to the continent. Over dinner the leaders planned to discuss Russia and the Ukraine. “There’s still time,” Cameron said at a joint press conference with Merkel, “for Vladimir Putin to change course.” He and Merkel put on a united front, and especially as they reflected on the horror in Paris. The U.K. security services MI5 and MI6 had given the leaders a joint briefing, who in turn emphasized the importance of international cooperation in combating terror attacks. Both leaders also spoke of the importance of upholding free speech. “There is no one single answer to these appalling terrorist attacks,” said Cameron. “We have to all be vigilant. We have to try to address all the problems of radicalization that have happened in our country. But as we do all these things, we must be very clear about one thing, which is we should never give up the values that we believe in and defend as part of our democracy and civilization and believing in a free press, in freedom of expression, in the right of people to write and say what they believe. These are the things we are defending. We should be very clear on this day that these values that we have are not sources of weakness for us, they are sources of strength.”
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Post by Admin on Jan 8, 2015 22:35:23 GMT
French police officials identified three men as suspects in a deadly attack against newspaper offices that killed 12 people and shook the nation on Wednesday. Two officials named the suspects as Frenchmen Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, who are brothers and in their early 30s, as well as 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear. One of the officials said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network. A witness of Wednesday's shootings at the offices of weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo said one of the attackers told onlookers, "You can tell the media that it's al-Qaida in Yemen." The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to publicly discuss the sensitive and ongoing investigation. No arrests have been confirmed in the hunt for the attackers. Masked gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, methodically killing 12 people, including the editor, before escaping in a car. It was France's deadliest terrorist attack in half a century. Cherif Kouachi was convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency and sentenced to 18 months in prison. During Cherif Kouachi's 2008 trial, he told the court, "I really believed in the idea" of fighting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. He said he was motivated by his outrage at television images of torture of Iraqi inmates at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib. Shouting "Allahu akbar!" as they fired, the men also spoke fluent, unaccented French in the military-style noon-time attack on Charlie Hebdo, located near Paris' Bastille monument. The publication's depictions of Islam have drawn condemnation and threats before — it was firebombed in 2011 — although it also satirized other religions and political figures. President Francois Hollande said it was a terrorist act "of exceptional barbarism," adding that other attacks have been thwarted in France in recent weeks. Fears have been running high in France and elsewhere in Europe that jihadis returning from conflicts in Syria and Iraq will stage attacks at home.
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Post by Admin on Jan 9, 2015 22:28:26 GMT
Brothers linked to the Charlie Hebdo attack, and another gunman with ties to the two, were killed following separate hostage-takings in Paris that also left four hostages dead. Police confirmed the death of the two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, who had been cornered and holding at least one hostage in a printing house northeast of Paris, in the small industrial town of Dammartin-en-Goele. That hostage was freed safely. A security official said the two brothers came out firing, prompting the assault on the building where they were holed up. In the other hostage-taking, police raided a kosher grocery in the Porte de Vincennes neighbourhood in eastern Paris where a gunman, Amedi Coulibaly, had taken 19 hostages. That gunman was killed in the raid, along with four hostages, French President Francois Hollande confirmed in an address to the nation. "It is indeed an appalling anti-Semitic act that was committed," he said of the hostage-taking at the Kosher market. An Israeli government official, recounting a conversation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the French president, said 15 hostages were rescued from the kosher grocery. The fate of a fourth suspect — Hayet Boumddiene, wife of the supermarket attacker — remained unclear and Paris shut down a famed Jewish neighbourhood amid fears that a wider terror cell might launch further attacks. France's interior minister warned his shaken nation to remain "extremely vigilant." A French television news network spoke directly with two of the terrorists Friday before they died. BFM television said it spoke with Cherif Kouachi as he and his brother were cornered near Charles de Gaulle airport and he told the station they were financed and dispatched by al-Qaida in Yemen. The station also said it spoke with Coulibaly, who said the three men were co-ordinating and that he was with the militant Islamic State group. The organizations are normally rivals. Earlier, security forces had streamed into Dammartin-en-Goele, near Charles de Gaulle airport, in a massive operation to seize the two men at the printing house suspected of carrying out what has been referred to as France's deadliest terror attack in decades. One of the men had been convicted of terrorism charges in 2008, while the other had visited Yemen and a U.S. official said both brothers were on the American no-fly list.
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Post by Admin on Jan 10, 2015 22:42:48 GMT
The French female terror suspect on the run is no longer in France and appears to have left before this week's terror attacks struck that nation. A Turkish intelligence official told the Associated Press on Saturday that a woman with the same name and resembling a widely distributed photo of Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, flew to Istanbul on Jan. 2. Authorities believe she traveled to Sanliurfa near the Syrian border on Jan. 4, then disappeared. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to the AP because he wasn't authorized to speak on the record. Boumeddiene had been wanted in connection with the Thursday shooting death of a policewoman, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, 27. A police bulletin on Friday described her as armed and dangerous, and a massive manhunt had been underway for her Saturday in Paris. On Friday, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins revealed Boumeddiene, the widow of slain supermarket gunman Amedy Coulibaly, exchanged 500 phone calls in 2014 with the wife of Cherif Kouachi, one of the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack. Heavily armed police mounted simultaneous attacks on two hostage standoffs Friday, killing Cherif Kouachi, 32, and his brother, Said Kouachi, 34, who had holed up in a warehouse north of Paris. Just minutes later, officers stormed the kosher supermarket where Coulibaly had opened fire, killing four before taking hostages. Coulibaly was killed during the police assault. In an interview with French broadcaster BFMTV during Friday's standoff, Coulibaly — also a suspect in the policewoman's attack — claimed the assault on the officer and the Kouachi brothers' assault on French magazine Charlie Hebdo were "coordinated." Authorities are digging for more information about the phone calls and consider Boumeddiene an "important witness" who must be questioned, said Christophe Crepin, spokesman for the UNSA police union. "She has had a relationship with an individual whose ideology has been expressed in violence, and by the execution of poor people who were just doing their shopping in a supermarket," Crepin said. In the eyes of French officials, "she is a dangerous woman," he said. Boumeddiene and Coulibaly wed in July 2009 in an Islamic religious ceremony — a union that is not recognized by French law. Boumeddiene, who has an Algerian background, altered her name to "make it sound more French," the Daily Mail reported.
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Post by Admin on Jan 11, 2015 21:41:28 GMT
In a bold show of unity in the face of global terrorism, millions will rally across France on Sunday. World leaders converging on Paris will join the hundreds of thousands in a number of French cities. Security has been beefed up massively. The Sunday rally, dubbed a “cry for freedom”, will commemorate the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and comes after three days of standoffs and hostage situations, with one terror suspect still on the run. Latest reports, however, indicate the suspected woman might have been in Syria at the time of the attacks, which took 17 lives, journalists and policemen among them. Starting at 14:00 GMT, the rally will have tens of thousands marching down three major routes in the capital. They will be joined by world leaders, including the Palestinian and Israeli leadership, leaders from Germany, Britain, other NATO countries and representatives from the Arab League, as well as the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. This is expected to present a formidable security challenge for France’s law enforcement, whose presence has been boosted across the board, with tens of thousands already guarding sensitive locations like schools, places of worship and others – more than 2,000 are being deployed in addition. Top US security brass will also arrive, and they will meet with their European counterparts in Paris to discuss an anti-terrorism strategy. On Saturday, some 700,000 people marched in solidarity in Paris, Orleans, Nice and other cities. Candlelight vigils were held for the victims. The Yemeni branch of Al-Qaeda is widely thought to be the group that coordinated the Charlie Hebdo attack. A statement sent to several media outlets by an alleged member of the group claimed it as “revenge for the honor” of Prophet Muhammad. The kosher shop situation that transpired later was motivated by similar feelings, that Islam is being berated and mocked by the West. Some news outlets in a show of solidarity reprinted Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons. On Sunday, just as world leaders were gathering to discuss security and the global fight against terrorism, one such paper – the Morgenpost - was set ablaze. However, police have not yet confirmed that the arson was indeed related to the Hebdo situation. No one was injured in the fire. France is not alone in its quest to send a message to the terrorists. Hundreds of Australians also took to the streets in Sydney. They gathered at Martin Place, which became the scene of a deadly siege in mid-December, to show support for the victims of the French attacks, as the global show of solidarity continues.
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