Charlie Hebdo: Three Days of Terror Join Cyrille Bicat, Stephane Deriau Reine (The French Perspective), Greg Barnes and Vivian Komori in a round table discussion.
Wednesday 7 January, a black
Citroen C3 drove up to the Charlie Hebdo building
in Rue Nicolas-Appert. Two masked gunmen, dressed in black and armed with
Kalashnikov assault rifles got out and approached the offices.
They burst into number 6, Rue Nicolas-Appert,
before realizing they had the wrong address. They then moved down the street to
number 10 - where the Charlie Hebdo offices are on the second floor.
Once inside, the men - now known to be
brothers Cherif and Said
Kouachi - asked maintenance staff in reception where the
magazine's offices were, before shooting dead caretaker Frederic Boisseau.
One of the magazine's cartoonists, Corinne Rey,
described how she had just returned to the building after picking up her
daughter from day care when the gunmen threatened her, forcing her to enter the
code for the keypad entry to the newsroom on the second floor - where a weekly
editorial meeting was taking place.
The men
opened fire and killed the editor's police bodyguard, Franck Brinsolaro, before
asking for editor Stephane
Charbonnier, known as Charb, and other four cartoonists by name and
killing them, along with three other editorial staff and a guest attending the
meeting.
Witnesses said they had heard the gunmen
shouting "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad" and "God is
Great" in Arabic while calling out the names of the journalists.
Police, alerted to a shooting incident,
arrived at the scene as the gunmen were leaving the building.
13 people lost their lives