WATCH ABOVE: Six days after the attack on the office of ‘Charlie Hebdo,’ the surviving journalists have promised not to let what happened to them and their colleagues silence them. Eric Sorensen reports.
A cartoonist for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo broke down during an emotional press conference Tuesday afternoon as he described how he created the front page for the newest edition following the Paris terror attacks last week.
Renald Luzier, who goes by the pen-name Luz, told reporters how he created a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad crying holding a sign reading “Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie)” below the words “tout est pardonne (All is forgiven).” The issue is expected to be published Wednesday.
“Then there was nothing else but that, this idea of drawing Muhammad, I am Charlie. And I looked at him, he was crying, and over it I wrote ‘All is forgiven’. I cried, and it was the front page,” Luzier told reporters in French and translated by The Guardian.
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“We had found the front page, we had at last found this damned front page, and it was our front page, not the one the world wanted us to do, but the one that we wanted to do.”
A visibly emotional Luzier held back tears adding, “I’m sorry we’ve drawn him yet again but the Muhammad we’ve drawn is a man who is crying.”
According to the New York Times the surviving members of Charlie Hebdo have been working since Friday behind editor-in-chief Gerard Biard to put the new edition out and have been working at the offices of the daily newspaper Libération under heavy police protection.
Biard spoke first at the press conference describing the creation of the new edition had been made “with joy as well as pain.”
“We are happy to have done it, happy to have managed to do it,” Biard said. “It was difficult because it had to be something of us, something of the events which we have been confronted with. This edition – the whole of Charlie Hebdo is in it. This edition is Charlie Hebdo.”
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Biard told reporters this week’s issue will be sold for two weeks and will have a run of 3 million copies.
Twelve people were killed when two masked gunmen attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7, including most of the editorial staff and two police officers.
The violent attack began three days of terror around Paris that ended with 17 dead before the three Islamic extremist attackers were gunned down by French security forces.
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