PARIS // Muslims are the main victims of fanaticism, the French president Francois Hollande said on Thursday as five victims of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris were buried.
Speaking at the Arab World Institute in Paris, Mr Hollande said: “It is Muslims who are the main victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism and intolerance”, adding the whole country was “united in the face of terrorism”.
He said the Muslim community in France, Europe’s largest, had “the same rights and the same duties as all citizens” and must be protected.
Among the five people buried yesterday were two of the best-known cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine whose offices were attacked by two gunment last week.
Georges Wolinski, 80, and Bernard Verlhac, 57, two of France’s best-loved cartoonists, were buried in separate funerals attended by hundreds of relatives, friends, officials and wellwishers.
Large crowds also attended the funerals of columnist Elsa Cayat, policeman Franck Brinsolaro, who died guarding Charlie Hebdo’s late editor Stephane Charbonnier, and economist Bernard Maris, who was present when the gunmen burst into the Paris offices of the weekly on January 7.
The French rushed to get their hands on the magazine’s latest “survivors’ issue” on Wednesday that sparked fury in some parts of the Muslim world for depicting the Prophet Mohammed on its cover.
The magazine sold out on Wednesday before more copies of an eventual print run of five million hit newsstands, and continued to fly off the shelves on Thursday.
The Charlie Hebdo assault on January 7 was followed two days later by an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris by a gunman claiming to have coordinated his actions with brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi.
Amedy Coulibaly, who shot dead four Jewish men at the supermarket, claimed links to the extremist group ISIL in Syria and Iraq.
In all, 17 people died over three days in the bloodiest attacks in France in half a century, which ended when police killed all three gunmen.
As French police continue to search for accomplices to the attacks, a Spanish high court judge on Thursday announced a preliminary investigation into a stay Coulibaly made in Madrid just days earlier.
Spanish security forces were reported as saying that Coulibaly, accompanied by his wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, and a third party who could have aided the latter’s escape to Syria, were in Madrid from December 30 to January 2.
In Belgium, investigators on Thursday said they were probing whether an arms dealer sold weapons used in the Paris attacks, after confirming Coulibaly sold the man a car belonging to Boumedienne.
The man, Neetin Farasula, from the airport city of Charleroi in French-speaking southern Belgium, is in detention on suspicion of a possible link to the weapons used in last week’s attacks.
The head of cyberdefence for France’s military said on Thursday that the Paris attacks have been followed by a wave of cyberattacks on about 19,000 French websites in recent days, some carried out by well-known extremist hacker groups.
Calling it an unprecedented surge, Admiral Arnaud Coustilliere said the attacks, mostly relatively minor denial-of-service attacks, hit sites as varied as military regiments to pizza shops but none appeared to have caused serious damage.
“What’s new, what’s important, is that this is 19,000 sites – that’s never been seen before,” Adm Coustilliere said. “This is the first time that a country has been faced with such a large wave of cyber-contestation.”
Meanwhile, the French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Thursday that Malian a supermarket employee who helped hostages to hide during Coulibaly’s attack would be given French citizenship.
Lassana Bathily, who has lived in France since 2006, had applied in July last year for French nationality.
Mr Cazeneuve, praising his “bravery”, said he would be given it at a ceremony on Tuesday.
Dozens of world leaders attended a solidarity rally on Sunday in Paris and France continued to receive support from its western allies On Thursday, with the German chancellor Angela Merkel vowing the two countries would “stand together in these difficult days”.
The US secretary of state John Kerry arrived in Paris to pay his respects to the dead, and said he wanted to give the capital a “big hug”.
He said his trip was not an apology for the Obama administration’s failure to send a senior official to last weekend’s unity march. Rather, he said it was to express the “affection” Americans have for France, which has been on edge since the attacks.
* Agence France-Presse
