Charlie Hebdo attack: Mourners in France, Israel pay tribute to victims

With a printing press, medals of honour and ceremonies thousands of kilometresapart, France and Israel paid tribute Tuesday to those killed in the Paris terrorist attacks. In Bulgaria, authorities said a Frenchman already under arrest had ties to the Paris gunmen who left 17 victims in their wake.

Defying the bloodshed and terror of last week, a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad is to appear Wednesday on the cover of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, weeping and holding a placard with the words "I am Charlie." Above him is emblazoned: "All is forgiven" a phrase one writer said meant to show that the survivors of the attacks forgave the gunmen.

"I think that those who have been killed, if they were here, they would have been able to have a coffee today with the terrorists and just talk to them, ask them why they have done this," columnist Zineb El Rhazoui told the BBC. "We feel, as Charlie Hebdo's team, that we need to forgive the two terrorists who have killed our colleagues."

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Two masked gunmen opened the onslaught in Paris with a Jan. 7 attack on the paper, singling out its editor and his police bodyguard for the first shots before killing 12 people in all. Ahmed Merabet, a French Muslim policeman, was one of the victims, killed as he lay wounded on the ground as the gunmen brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi made their escape.

Charlie Hebdo, which lampoons religion indiscriminately, had received threats after depicting Muhammed before, and its offices were firebombed in 2011. Its editor, Stphane Charbonnier, was under constant guard. Its surviving staff say they have been working feverishly since the attacks in loaned office space to put out the latest issue.

France's main Muslim organization called Tuesday for calm, fearing that a new Muhammad cartoon could inflame passions anew.

'They died so that we could live free'

At police headquarters in Paris, French President Francois Hollande paid separate tribute Tuesday to the three police officers killed in the attacks, placing Legion of Honor medals on their caskets.

"They died so that we could live free," he said, flanked by hundreds of police officers.

Hollande vowed that France will be "merciless in the face of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslims acts, and unrelenting against those who defend and carry out terrorism, notably the jihadists who go to Iraq and Syria."

As Chopin's funeral march played in central Paris and the caskets draped in French flags were led from the building, a procession began in Jerusalem for the four Jewish victims of the attack Friday on a kosher supermarket in Paris.

"Returning to your ancestral home need not be due to distress, out of desperation, amidst destruction, or in the throes of terror and fear," said Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. "Terror has never kept us down, and we do not want terror to subdue you."

In an emotional ceremony at a hillside cemetery amid tight security, Israeli Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahu denounced the "terrorism of extremist Islam" behind Friday's assault on the grocery and called on Jews around the world to return to Israel.

"Today, more than ever, Israel is the true home of all of us, and the greater our number and the more united we are in our land, the stronger we will be in our one and only country and that is the hope of the entire Jewish people," he said.

Another arrest made

French police say as many as six members of the militant cell that carried out the Paris attacks may still be at large, including a man seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen. The country has deployed 10,000 troops to protect sensitive sites, including Jewish schools and synagogues, mosques and travel hubs.

Amid the hunt for accomplices, Bulgarian authorities said Tuesday they have a Frenchman under arrest who is believed to have links to Cherif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers.

Fritz-Joly Joachin, 29, was arrested Jan. 1 as he tried to cross into Turkey, under two European arrest warrants, one citing his alleged links to a terrorist organization and a second for allegedly kidnapping his 3-year-old son and smuggling him out of the country, said Darina Slavova, the regional prosecutor for Bulgaria's southern province of Haskovo.

"He met with Kouachi several times at the end of December," Slavova said.

The Kouachi brothers and their friend, Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages in the Paris grocery, died Friday in clashes with French police.

Two French police officials told The Associated Press that authorities were searching around Paris for the Mini Cooper registered to Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly's widow, who Turkish officials say is now in Syria.