PARIS — One by one, the witnesses told a hushed court how their lives were brutally upended on a cold January morning in 2015, when two brothers wielding assault rifles burst onto a quiet Parisian street looking for the newsroom of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly. Jérémy Ganz, a colleague of Frédéric Boisseau — a maintenance worker shot dead as the gunmen searched for the newspaper’s unmarked offices — recalled how his hands were covered with so much blood that he couldn’t unlock his phone to call for help. Corinne Rey, a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, spoke tearfully of sheer terror and “absolute distress” when the attackers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, forced her at gunpoint to guide them to the office doors and punch in the entrance code, before they walked in and started to shoot. Sigolène Vinson, a lawyer and contributor to the weekly, recounted how the gunmen left behind a cloud of gunpowder and the strong smell of blood. Around her, shards of bullet-torn bones were like “shining specks of glitter,” she said, while the body of Stéphane Charbonnier, the editorial director, was face down like a “dislocated puppet.”

Source: New York Times September 10, 2020 12:22 UTC