By Madame Le Cerf
On 7th January 2015 the brothers Chérif and SaÏd Kouachi attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo at 10, rue Nicolas Appert in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. In all, they killed 12 people including 8 members of the Charlie Hebdo team and 2 police officers.
Five years, eight months and eighteen days later a 25 year old Pakistani, Zaheer Mahmood, rocked up at the same address to do his bit for the honour of the prophet. This ignorant jihadi was completely unaware that Charlie Hebdo had moved to a secure and secret location, and he was determined to mete out punishment to the mécreants at the satirical weekly, which had, recently, during the trial of the Kouachi brothers’ accomplices, republished cartoons of Mohammed.
In the weeks before, Mahmood had done some research on the internet to find Charlie Hebdo’s address but missed the fact that it had changed after the Kouachis’ attack. He visited the old address several times to sus the place out but still failed to realise that that the magazine just wasn’t there! At 8.02 a.m. on the 25th September 2020 he recorded a video saying that he was going to “revolt against the caricatures of our pure and beloved prophet”. He then bought a meat cleaver, a knife and two bottles of white spirit. He travelled to Richard-Lenoir metro station a few dozen metres from 10, rue Nicolas Appert, arriving at 11.36 a.m.. The address then housed the offices of Première Ligne, a press agency. “Hélène”, an employee arriving for work then, bumped into “Paul” who had come down from the offices to smoke a cigarette and decided to join him. Instead of going into the interior courtyard as usual, they stood in the porch which opened onto the street so as to shelter from the rain. Carefree, they laughed together remembering the celebration for “Hélène’s” birthday which had taken place in a local bar the previous night. Just before 11.40, the CCTV camera two doors away recorded a horribly violent scene which was replayed at Mahmood’s trial. Brandishing his meat cleaver, he rained down 5 blows on “Paul” and 4 on “Hélène”. He then ran off but was arrested an hour later at Bastille metro station.
Despite the savagery of the attack, the two victims survived. A witness described how he found “Paul”. “He was sitting on a wall with his feet in a pool of blood. He was badly wounded in the head and one hand. He said to me ‘I think I’m dying.’” Another witness said that “Hélène” had been wounded in the cheek and the back of her head. “I had to keep talking to her so that she remained conscious. She was very brave. When the emergency services arrived to take them to hospital, I found that my hands and jeans were covered in blood, just as you see in films.”
“Paul” had to be put in an artificial coma and underwent emergency surgery. He almost died. He remained unconscious until the 12th October. He had to spend time in the hospital both as an inpatient and as an outpatient until July 2021. He said at the trial that he could expect no further physical recovery but that he had some way to go in his recovery from the psychological effects of the attack.
“Hélène” was less badly injured and was able to leave hospital after a week. However, she has not been able to overcome the mental trauma caused by the attack.
The start of the trial of Zaheer Mahmood and five of his compatriots who were charged with having “motivated and supported “him in his jihadi enterprise coincided with the 10th anniversary commemorations for the attack on Charlie Hebdo. The trial was conducted in the juvenile court as some of the accused were under 18 at the time of the attack. The prosecution asked that Mahmood be sentenced to 35 years in prison with 20 years before parole could be considered and between 3 and 13 years for his accomplices.
Mahmood maintained that, when he arrived at what he thought were the offices of Charlie Hebdo, he did not intend to hurt anybody He claimed that he had just gone to set fire to the offices, saying “Friday is the best day for Islam”. He went on to say “When I got close, I heard somebody laughing. I thought they were people from Charlie Hebdo and that they were laughing at me. I put down my bag, got out my chopper and attacked them”. The lawyers for the prosecution and the victims completely rejected this version of events. They said that it was obvious that he had gone to kill and that, in accordance with his murderous religious convictions, he had gone to rue Nicolas Appert with the firm intention of beheading the blasphemers.
Given how the would-be murderer had gone tooled up and had viciously attacked “Paul” and “Hélène”, there could be no doubt about Mahmood’s guilt. His own lawyer, Maitre de Guyadon, said “Each of the blows struck against “Paul” and “Hélène” was meant to kill. Each of these blows could have killed them and, indeed, nearly did. Nobody is looking to contest the responsibility for the attack or the guilt of Zaheer Mahmood. The question which remains is the sentence”. And then the court was subjected to some special pleading. Mahmood’s lawyer pointed out that Pakistani law proposed the death penalty for blasphemy. At the moment of the attack, Mahmood he said, “was physically in France but in his head, he was still in his native land where, in the best of cases, blasphemers were arrested and, in the worst, lynched”. He described “the bubble of a closed community” in which the young man was living. Mahmood himself tried to justify his actions to the police saying, during his interrogation, “I thought that was the law of the Koran and Pakistan”.
Maitre de Guyadon put forward the idea that the attack at the rue Nicolas Appert was not rooted in typical jihadism but should be looked at in a national context. “His inspiration was the mob. The mob that was demonstrating in September 2020” (referring to demonstrations in Pakistan against the republishing of the cartoons by Charlie Hebdo). He pointed out the devotion to the prophet Mohammed and the desire to always to “defend his honour” which was particularly strong in the Barelvi strand of Sunni Islam and how this devotion could be regarded as the “national identity” of Pakistan which literally means “Land of the Pure”.
“The effort of mental flexibility that this case demands of us is absolutely enormous” he opined. “We should not judge it like other cases of terrorism where the accused are “children of the Republic” because, of course, Mahmood was still “mentally in Pakistan”.
But this sort of “reasoning” and special pleading exposes a very large elephant in the room. How many thousands and tens of thousands of migrants could this be said of? And how far can we take “mental flexibility” without risking the survival of our moral and legal system when they are confronted with ever-increasing demands to take into account the cultural context of this kind of crime?
Who could imagine that “Paul” and “Hélène” might take comfort in the fact that the man who had tried to butcher them and who had succeeded in ruining the lives with which they barely escaped, had been brainwashed into believing that he was acting righteously and in conformity with his religion?
Luckily the judges were not impressed by this cultural special pleading. Mahmood was sentenced to 30 years and his 5 co-accused got between 3 and 12 years. All should be deported (supposedly!) on completion of their sentences.
