Thousands were today paying tribute to dead Muslim police officer Ahmed Merabet using the rallying cry ‘JeSuisAhmed’ after the heroic officer was gunned down in Paris.
The celebration of Mr Merabet, who was killed as he begged for his life by suspected Islamic fanatics, echoes the ‘JeSuisCharlie’ (I am Charlie) demonstrations that have swept the world in the wake of yesterday’s shocking massacre.
His colleagues today said they were in extreme shock after a video of the Charlie Hebdo office attack emerged – showing Mr Merabet on the ground and begging for mercy as he is killed casually executed by a gunshot to the head.
Today, #JeSuisAhmed began trending on Twitter as thousands expressed their admiration for his sacrifice while defending the right to freedom of speech.
The rallying cry is a play on words of ‘Je Suis Charlie’, the catchphrase spawned in the wake of the deadly massacre to show solidarity with those killed.
Mr Merabet, originally from Livry-Gargan in north eastern Paris, had been a fully-trained police officer for eight years.
Today his police union colleagues released a statement, stating they were in shock after seeing him ‘shot down like a dog’.
The union’s departmental secretary, Rocco Contento, said he was a very quiet and conscientious man.
He added: ‘We are all extremely shocked. The police are deeply affected by the video of the murder of their colleague circulating on some networks.’
It is understood that Mr Merabet was a married Parisian cycle cop assigned to the 11th arrondissement – the Paris neighbourhood where Charlie Hebdo’s office is located and known for its dining and fine wines.
As the French magazine vowed to publish next week in defiance of the massacre, one French mourner wrote: ‘Ahmed Merabet died protecting the innocent from hate. I salute him.’
Mr Merabet was one of 12 people killed in the terrifying attack, including eight journalists at the offices of the French satirical newspaper, two guests, and one other policeman.
Tributes for Mr Merabet continuing pouring in today, with one person writing: ‘RIP Ahmed Merabet, French policeman, murdered protecting people in Paris’, while Alan Mendoza said: ‘Important to note that amid the carnage today a brave Muslim policeman was murdered by those claiming to represent Islam.’
His family have said they wish to bury him at a famous Muslim cemetery in France. Located just north-east of Paris, it is the burial ground of more than 7,000 Muslims.
Editor Stephane Charbonnier – who famously said he would rather die than ‘live like a rat’ – was also killed alongside Franck Brinsolaro, a police officer assigned to protect him.
The hugely popular cartoonists Bernard Verlhac, Georges Wolinski, Jean Cabut and Philippe Honore were also massacred, alongside with psychiatrist Elsa Cayat, and Bernard Maris, Michael Renaud, Frederic Boisseau and Mustapha Ourrad.
The second police officer to be killed in the attack was Franck Brinsolaro, 49, a brigadier and protection officer for the magazine’s editor Stephane Charbonnier.
The married 49-year-old lived in Bernay, France, and was the father of two children. His wife, Ingrid Brinsolaro, is editor of the Awakening Normand, Bernay, a newspaper that belongs to the group Publihebdos, as Hebdo de Sevre et Maine.
The team at Publihebdos have released a statement regarding the killing.
It read: ‘Publihebdos teams are in shock after the cowardly attack and great seriousness that hit Charlie Hebdo today.
‘This barbaric attack left many victims including a downed police was the husband of Ingrid Brinsolaro, our editor at Bernay. We are devastated and very sad.
‘We believe that family close to us, destroyed by this horror, who lives in the moment of dramatic hours and that all changed this January 7th.
‘With this attack it is the journalists that one is, is freedom of the press is challenged and through it all our freedoms.
‘Our duty, the honor of the publishing community is to affirm more than ever its solidarity with his friends of Charlie Hebdo for the defense and illustration of the freedom of the press.
‘It is also declare that it will never yield to threats and intimidation against intangible principles of freedom of expression.’
Among the victims was Mr Charbonnier, the defiant editor whose satirical newspaper dared to poke fun at everything from religion to feminism.
While others may have left Islam alone amid constant warnings of violence, Mr Charbonnier refused to relent.
‘I am not afraid of retaliation. I have no children, no wife, no car, no credit,’ he said after receiving death threats two years ago. ‘It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.’
Mr Charbonnier – nicknamed Charb – spoke out fiercely against political correctness, saying: ‘It should be as normal to criticise Islam as it is to criticise Jews or Catholics.’
The 47-year-old, who took over as editor in 2009, grew up in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northern France and joined Charlie Hebdo in the early 1990s as a designer.
Jean ‘Cabu’ Cabut was another victim. The magazine’s 76-year-old lead cartoonist was an almost legendary cultural figure in France.
Known by the nickname ‘Cabu’, he was renowned for his quick wit and youthful style. He was also notorious for his drawing of Mohammed, which sparked fury after adorning the cover of Charlie Hebdo in 2006.
Despite all the controversy, Mr Cabut was insistent that art should not be constrained. Perhaps his most famous quote was: ‘Sometimes laughter can hurt – but laughter, humour and mockery are our only weapons.’
Also among the dead was Georges Wolinski, an 80-year-old who was as renowned for his colourful home life as he was for being a ‘master of satirical illustration’.
Married twice, he once joked about his dying wish, saying: ‘I want to be cremated. I said to my wife, “if you throw the ashes in the toilet, I get to see your bottom every day”.’
Mr Wolinski was born in Tunis on June 28, 1934 to a Franco-Italian mother and a Polish Jewish father. He joined Hara-Kiri with Cabu in 1960 and became renowned for his cartoons, which spoofed politics and sexuality.
Another victim, cartoonist Bernard ‘Tignous’ Verlhac, was a renowned pacifist. The 57-year-old Parisian had been drawing for the French press since 1980 and originally made his name on comic publication L’idiot international.
Mourners were also last night paying tribute to Philippe Honore, a regular contributor to Charlie Hebdo who specialised in ‘literary puzzles’. The 73-year-old was born in Vichy, central France, and was first published aged just 16.
Victim Bernard Maris was a Left-wing economist, known to readers as ‘Uncle Bernard’. Heartbroken friends said the 68-year-old was a ‘cultured, kind and very tolerant man’.
Also killed was Michel Renaud, who did not work for Charlie Hebdo, but had been invited to the magazine’s offices as guest editor. He was the founder of ‘Rendez-vous de Carnet de Voyage’, a travel-themed art festival.
It has been reported that the final two victims are Frédéric Boisseau, a maintenance worker, and Elsa Cayat.
Ms Cayat, the only female victim of the gunmen, was a columnist and analyst for the magazine, according to Le Figaro.
Post mortems will be held on Thursday, according to reports citing the prosecutor of Paris, François Molins.
Police officers were involved in a gunfight with the ‘calm and highly disciplined men’, who escaped in a hijacked car, speeding away towards east Paris. They remain on the loose, along with a third armed man.
Tributes have been pouring in to the ‘heroic’ men who refused to be intimidated and who saw their work as vital tools of political expression, with one Twitter user stating ‘you wanted to kill Charlie Hebdo, you just made it immortal’.
As the world expressed its horror at the massacre, Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Gerard Biard said ‘a newspaper is not a weapon of war.’
The gunmen reportedly asked for the cartoonists by name before shooting them dead and yelling ‘the Prophet has been avenged’.
And there were unconfirmed reports that one of the gunmen said to a witness: ‘You say to the media, it was Al Qaeda in Yemen.’
President Francois Hollande said the bloodbath – France’s deadliest postwar terrorist outrage – was a ‘barbaric attack against France, and against journalists’.
The magazine’s offices were burnt down in a petrol attack in 2011 after running a magazine cover of the Prophet Mohammed as a cartoon character.
Afterwards Charbonnier remained defiant, saying that Islam could not be excluded from freedom of the press.
He said: ‘If we can poke fun at everything in France, if we can talk about anything in France apart from Islam or the consequences of Islamism, that is annoying.’
Mr Charbonnier said he did not see the attack on the magazine as the work of French Muslims, but of what he called ‘idiot extremists’.
The cover showed Mohammed saying: ‘100 lashes if you are not dying of laughter’.
Mr Charbonnier, who once said ‘a drawing has never killed anyone’, was included in a 2013 Wanted Dead or Alive for Crimes Against Islam article published by Inspire, the terrorist propaganda magazine published by Al Qaeda.
In 2012 he said: ‘I don’t feel as though I’m killing someone with a pen. I’m not putting lives at risk. When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.’
Charbonnier said that he didn’t fear reprisals. After publishing naked pictures of the Prophet in 2012, he said: ‘I have neither a wife nor children, not even a dog. But I’m not going to hide.’
He added: ‘It should be as normal to criticize Islam as it is to criticize Jews or Catholics. I’d rather die than live like a rat.’
Georges Wolinski, who lived in Paris, was married twice, first to Jacqueline Saba, with whom he had two children, Frederica and Natacha, and then in 1971 to Maryse Bachere. They had one daughter together, Elsa-Angela.
Wolinski previously lived off the fashionable Boulevard Saint Germain where he was a well-known and well-liked character.
A waiter called Mathieu – who works in a cafe on the Rue Bonaparte where Wolinski lived – tonight paid tribute to him.
He told MailOnline: ‘He was a great man and a great cartoonist. Everybody around here knew him and admired him for his work.
‘He would come in every morning for an espresso and would chat to everyone, including all of the staff.
‘This is a very liberal area, with lots of bookstores, so we are all in shock today.
‘A lot of the Charlie Hebdo staff would eat and drink around here and have lots of friends in this neighbourhood, so it is a very sad day for us all and for Paris.’
Cabu’s drawings first appeared in a local French newspaper in 1954. He was conscripted to the Army for two years for the Algerian War, but that didn’t stop his creative talent, which was put to use in the army magazine Bled and in Paris-Match.
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s his career flourished, with the artist co-creating Hara-Kiri magazine, working on children’s TV show Recre A2 and eventually working on Charlie Hebdo as a caricaturists.
His most controversial moment came in 2006 when his drawing of the Muslim prophet Muhammad appeared on the cover with the caption ‘Muhammad overwhelmed by fundamentalists’ with a speech bubble containing the words ‘so hard to be loved by jerks’. Muslims consider any drawings of the prophet to be extremely offensive.
He was the father of French singer/songwriter Mano Solo, who died in 2010.
Victim Bernard Maris was an economist who contributed to the newspaper and was heard regularly on French radio. He was married to journalist Sylvie Genevoix, who died on 20 September 2012.
Four of the other victims were named by French newspaper Le Monde.
The former chief of staff of the mayor of Clermont-Ferrand, Michel Renaud was reportedly among those that were killed while visiting the Paris office where he was invited to be a guest editor.
It is thought he was accompanied by friend, Gerard Gaillard, who escaped the shooting by lying on the ground, according to France 3 Auvergne.
Philippe Honoré was born in Vichy in 1941 and had his first cartoon published when he was just 16. He was a regular contributor to the magazine, specialising in puzzles, and had many books published.
The magazine’s proof reader, Mustapha Oura, is thought to have recently obtained French nationality.
Thousands of tributes to the cartoonists have appeared on Twitter.
Gabriel Heller paid tribute by posting his favourite quote from Jean Cabut: ‘Sometimes laughter can hurt, but laughter, humour and mockery are our only weapons.’
Christophe Trivalle wrote: ‘This day will be as memorable in France as 11th September in the US.’
Twitter user ArtByFab, meanwhile, said that the cartoonists ‘made me love and want to draw since I was a child’.
Another, Eleadorable, had a message for the killers: ‘You wanted to kill Charlie Hebdo, you just made it immortal.’
As well as the AK47 assault rifles, there were also reports of a rocket-propelled grenade being used in the attack, which took place during the publication’s weekly editorial meeting, meaning all the journalists would have been present.
When shots rang out at the office – located near Paris’ Bastille monument – it is thought that three policemen on bicycles were the first to respond.
‘There was a loud gunfire and at least one explosion,’ said an eye witness. ‘When police arrived there was a mass shoot-out. The men got away by car, stealing a car.’
A police official, Luc Poignant,told BFM TV: ‘It’s carnage.’
Survivor and Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Corinne ‘Coco’ Rey was quoted by French newspaper L’Humanite as saying: ‘I had gone to collect my daughter from day care and as I arrived in front of the door of the paper’s building two hooded and armed men threatened us. They wanted to go inside, to go upstairs. I entered the code.
‘They fired on Wolinski, Cabu… it lasted five minutes… I sheltered under a desk… They spoke perfect French… claimed to be from al Qaeda.’
Florence Pouvil, a salesperson at Lunas France on Rue Nicolas Appert, opposite Charlie Hebdo offices, told MailOnline: ‘I saw two people with big guns, like Kalashnekovs outside our office and then we heard firing. We were very confused.’
‘There were two guys who came out of the building and shot everywhere. We hid on the floor, we were terrified.
‘They came from the building opposite with big guns. It has a bunch of different companies inside. Some of our co-workers work there so we were frightened for them.
‘They weren’t just firing inside the Charlie Hebdo offices. They were firing in the street too.
‘We feared for our lives so we hid under our desks so they wouldn’t see us. Both men were dressed in black from head to toe and their faces were covered so I didn’t see them.
They were wearing military clothes, it wasn’t common clothing, like they were soldiers.’
Once inside the gunmen sought out Charbonnier, shouting ‘where is Charb? where is Charb? They killed him and his police bodyguard first, said Christophe Crepin, a police union spokesman. They then sprayed the rest of the room with bullets.
Minutes later, two men strolled out to a black car waiting below, calmly firing on a police officer, with one gunman shooting him in the head as he writhed on the ground, according to video and a man who watched in fear from his home across the street.
The witness, who refused to allow his name to be used because he feared for his safety, said the attackers were so methodical he first mistook them for France’s elite anti-terrorism forces. Then they fired on the officer.
‘They knew exactly what they had to do and exactly where to shoot. While one kept watch and checked that the traffic was good for them, the other one delivered the final coup de grace,’ he said. ‘They ran back to the car. The moment they got in, the car drove off almost casually.’
The witness added: ‘I think they were extremely well-trained, and they knew exactly down to the centimetre and even to the second what they had to do.
A visibly shocked French President François Hollande, speaking live near the scene of the shooting, said: ‘France is today in shock, in front of a terrorist attack.
‘This newspaper was threatened several rimes in the past and we need to show we are a united country.
‘We have to be firm, and we have to be stand strong with the international community in the coming days and weeks.
‘We are at a very difficult moment following several terrorist attacks. We are threated because we are a country of freedom
‘We will punish the attackers. We will look for the people responsible.’
Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Gerard Biard, who was in London at the time of the attack, spoke of his shock.
He told France Inter: ‘I don’t understand how people can attack a newspaper with heavy weapons. A newspaper is not a weapon of war.’
He said the magazine, started in 1960 by Georges Bernier and François Cavanna, had not received threats of violence: ‘Not to my knowledge, and I don’t think anyone had received them as individuals, because they would have talked about it. There was no particular tension at the moment.’
The deaths of the cartoonists will shock France as their work, though sometimes controversial, was extremely popular.
Marie Pommery, a French chef currently living in London, told MailOnline: ‘This is the worst attack on press freedom. A whole generation of French people grew up with Cabu and Wolinski’s cartoons. It’s shocking news.’
Prime Minister David Cameron joined the condemnation of the attack, saying: ‘The murders in Paris are sickening.
‘We stand with the French people in the fight against terror and defending the freedom of the press.’
The British Foreign Office immediately updated is advice for travellers heading to Pairs, warning: ‘There is a high threat from terrorism.’
It added: ‘If you’re in Paris or the Ile de France area take extra care and follow advice of French authorities.’
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
