Ten years ago today, two men armed with Kalashinikovs barged into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and opened fire. They unleashed hell. In less than two minutes, 12 people were slaughtered, eight of them writers or cartoonists at the famously scurrilous weekly. Their crime? Blasphemy. They had mocked Muhammad and they paid for it with their lives.
They were doing a jig on the graves of the dead. It defied moral comprehension
A decade on, this atrocity, this crime against liberty, still chills the soul. I can’t be the only journalist who works in a small, busy office who has found himself imagining the terror of that day. The din of gunfire, the whiff of smoke, the killers’ shrill cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ so that their victims might know the reason for their pitiless execution. No means of escape, no offer of mercy – it is a horror that stains our age.