On This Day: Three days of terrorism, including Charlie Hebdo attack, end in France - Jan. 9, 2015
(edited from Wikipedia)
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January 2015 Île-de-France attacks
From 7 to 9 January 2015, terrorist attacks occurred across the Île-de-France region, particularly in Paris.
Three attackers killed a total of 17 in four shooting attacks, and police then killed the three assailants. The attacks also wounded 22 other people. A fifth shooting attack did not result in any fatalities.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility and said that the coordinated attacks had been planned for years. The claim of responsibility for the deadly attack on the magazine came in a video showing AQAP commander Nasr Ibn Ali al-Ansi, with gunmen in the background that were later identified as the Kouachi brothers. However, while authorities say the video is authentic, there is no proof that AQAP helped to carry out the attacks. Amedy Coulibaly, who committed another leg of the attacks (the Montrouge shooting and the Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege) claimed that he belonged to ISIS before he died.
On December 16, 2020, 14 people who were accomplices to both the Jewish supermarket attack and the Charlie Hebdo shooting, including Coulibaly's former partner Hayat Boumeddiene, were convicted. However, three of these accomplices were not yet captured and were tried in absentia.
Attack events summary
The attacks began on 7 January, when two gunmen attacked the headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people and wounding 12 others before escaping. On 9 January, police tracked the assailants to an industrial estate in Dammartin-en-Goële, where they took a hostage.
Another gunman shot a police officer on 8 January. He killed four more victims and took hostages on January 9 at a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes.
French armed forces and police conducted simultaneous raids in Dammartin and Porte de Vincennes, killing all three attackers.
[Nationwide deployment]
After 12 January 2015 and for an indefinite period, as part of Operation Sentinelle, nearly 10,500 military personnel were deployed in France to secure 830 sensitive places (school, churches, press organizations, etc ).
[Scale]
At the time, the attacks comprised the deadliest act of terrorism in France since the 1961 Vitry-Le-François train bombing by the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), which was working against Algerian independence. These fatalities were surpassed ten months later by the November 2015 Paris attacks.
Background
In December 2014, three attacks occurred in a span of three days in France.
The first attack occurred in Joué-lès-Tours, in which a knife-wielding man attacked a police station, injuring three officers before being killed. The second attack occurred in Dijon, in which a man used a vehicle to run over eleven pedestrians in several areas of the city before being arrested. The third attack occurred in Nantes, in which a vehicular attack at a Christmas market resulted in ten people being injured and one fatality. The driver was arrested after attempting suicide.
Although the French government concluded that the attacks were not related to each other, it heightened the nation's security and deployed 300 soldiers to patrol the nation's streets.
Charlie Hebdo shooting
The first and deadliest of the attacks occurred at 11:30 CET on January 7, 2015, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The Charlie Hebdo magazine began publishing in 1970 with the goal of satirizing religion, politics, and other topics. In 2011, the magazine's offices were destroyed by a gasoline bomb after it published a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed. Two gunmen, later identified as Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, entered the building and fatally shot eight employees, two police officers, and two others, and injured eleven other people.
The primary motive behind the shooting is said to be the Charlie Hebdo cartoons making fun of numerous Islamic leaders. The shooting received widespread condemnation internationally and a National Day of Mourning was held in France on 8 January.
Killed:
Cabu, 76, cartoonist.
Elsa Cayat, 54, columnist .
Charb, 47, cartoonist, columnist, and director of publication of Charlie Hebdo.
Philippe Honoré, 73, cartoonist.
Bernard Maris, 68, columnist.
Mustapha Ourrad, 60, copy editor.
Tignous, 57, cartoonist.
Georges Wolinski, 80, cartoonist.
Frédéric Boisseau, 42, building maintenance worker.
Franck Brinsolaro, 49, bodyguard for Charb.
Ahmed Merabet, 42, police officer.
Michel Renaud, 69, a travel writer.
Fontenay-aux-Roses and Montrouge shootings
A few hours after the Charlie Hebdo attack, a 32-year-old man who was out jogging in Fontenay-aux-Roses was shot and wounded. The man suffered injuries to his arm and back and as of 11 January was in critical condition. Shell casings found at the scene were later linked to the weapon carried by Amedy Coulibaly at the Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket hostage crisis on January 9. However, the jogger refuted Coulibaly's involvement and recognized Amar Ramdani, a friend of Coulibaly, as the gunman.
On 8 January, Coulibaly shot and killed municipal police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe at the junction of Avenue Pierre Brossolette and Avenue de la Paix in Montrouge (a suburb of Paris), and critically wounded a street sweeper. As police continued their search for Charlie Hebdo suspects, they initially dismissed the idea that there could be a link between this shooting and the Charlie Hebdo killings, but later confirmed they were in fact connected.
Dammartin-en-Goële hostage crisis
On 9 January, the assailants of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, went to the office of Création Tendance Découverte, a signage production company on an industrial estate in Dammartin-en-Goële. The siege ended after nine hours at 16:30 after a combined force of French Armed Forces and police stormed the building and killed both Kouachi brothers, the assailants.
Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege
On 9 January 2015, Amedy Coulibaly, armed with a submachine gun, an assault rifle, and two Tokarev pistols, entered and attacked a Hypercacher kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes in Paris, France. There, Coulibaly murdered four Jewish hostages and held fifteen other hostages during a siege in which he demanded that the Kouachi brothers not be harmed. The siege ended when police stormed the supermarket, killing Coulibaly.
Several people were wounded during the incident. Lassana Bathily, a Muslim shop assistant born in Mali, was hailed as a hero in the crisis for risking his life to hide people from the gunman in a downstairs refrigerator room and assisting police after he escaped from the market.
Killed:
Philippe Braham, 45, IT sales executive.
Yohan Cohen, 22, an economics student and worker at Hyper Cacher.
Yoav Hattab, 21, a Tunisian college student.
François-Michel Saada, 64, retiree.
Cyber attacks
French media reported that hackers breached the security of French municipality websites during the Île-de-France attacks, changing them to display jihadist propaganda. The French Defense Ministry and security bodies reported that about 19,000 French websites were targeted in an unprecedented wave of denial-of-service attacks following the publication of Charlie Hebdo with a depiction of the sacred prophet Muhammad on the cover. The websites of French businesses, religious groups, universities, and municipalities were also hacked and altered to display pro-Islamist messages.
Incidents at mosques
In the week after the shooting, [there was a call] for strengthening of the surveillance of mosques. The French interior department reported that 54 anti-Muslim incidents were recorded in France in the first week after the shootings; this compared to 110 complaints in the first nine months of 2014. The 2015 incidents included 21 reports of shootings and blank grenade throwing at Islamic buildings including mosques; and 33 cases of personal threats and insults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2015_%C3%8Ele-de-France_attacks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercacher_kosher_supermarket_siege
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