Paris court jails man for deadly knife attack targeting Charlie Hebdo

A court sketch made on January 6, 2025 shows defendant Zaheer Mahmood during his trial at the juvenile court in Paris.

A French court on Thursday sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in prison for his attempt to stage an attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for its depictions of the Prophet Mohammed. Despite mistakenly targeting the magazine's former – not current – location, Zaheer Mahmood gravely wounded two people with a meat cleaver.

A Paris court on Thursday sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in jail for attempting to murder two people outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2020 with a meat cleaver.

When he carried out the attack, 29-year-old Zaheer Mahmood wrongly believed the satirical newspaper was still based in the building, which was targeted by Islamists a decade ago for publishing cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed.

In fact, Charlie Hebdo had moved in the wake of the storming of its offices by two Al-Qaeda-linked masked gunmen, who killed 12 people including eight of the paper's editorial staff.

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Originally from rural Pakistan, Mahmood arrived in France illegally in the summer of 2019.

None of the six in the dock reacted to the verdict.

(AFP)


Read more on FRANCE 24 English

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