Charlie Hebdo Attack: Funerals For Killers Held In Pakistan While Victims Are Honored In France, Jerusalem

Victims of the attacks on Paris, as well as the people who committed the killings, were honored Tuesday, in different parts of the world. While Paris and west Jerusalem organized memorial services for the victims, a cleric in Pakistan held "funerals" for two of the perpetrators of the attacks, which claimed the lives of 17 people over three days.

In the city of Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, a cleric held funerals for Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, two brothers who killed 12 people, including two policemen, at the office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week, NBC News reported. The two brothers, who had reportedly trained at an al Qaeda camp in Yemen, carried out the attacks to avenge the publication of the Prophet Muhammad in a cartoon in the controversial Parisian publication.

“Today we feel so proud to attend the funeral of our brothers,” NBC News quoted the cleric as saying, after holding the funeral in absentia. “They are heroes of Islam. They laid down their lives but eliminated those published caricatures of our Prophet Muhammad.”

The Kouachi brothers were killed by French police during an armed siege on Friday, after a three-day manhunt.

“We invited all the Muslims to join us as the two brothers had taken stand on our prophet by killing the publisher and cartoonists,” NBC News quoted a spokesman of the school that arranged the ceremony in a public park as saying.

Honoring Victims

In Paris, victims of the attacks, including three police officers, were buried in a somber ceremony at the Prefecture de Police in Paris, which was attended by French President Francois Hollande. All three police officers killed during the attacks were posthumously awarded France's “Legion of Honour” by Hollande, who called the officers “dynamic and brave.”

At the same time, Muslim groups in the country called for restraint ahead of the publication of the next Charlie Hebdo issue, which is again expected to carry a cartoon of the prophet.

In Israel, thousands of people gathered at a ceremony held in Jerusalem's Har Hamenuchot cemetery to honor the four victims who were killed by another Islamist gunman at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week. The funerals were attended by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin.

“The whole state is embracing you. Your relatives were killed only because they were Jewish,” Netanyahu said at the funeral, according to NBC News.

Rivlin said that it was unacceptable that Jews were living in fear in Europe.

“We cannot allow that in 2015, 70 years since the end of World War II, Jews are afraid to walk in the streets of Europe with skullcaps and tzitzit,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Rivlin as saying.

On Monday, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that the government would deploy nearly 5,000 police and security forces to protect 700 Jewish schools in the country. It was also announced that the country was mobilizing 10,000 security forces overall to offer better protection for its citizens.

ISIS Must Be ‘Wiped Out’

Meanwhile, in a strong indication that France would not pull back military operations overseas, France’s defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Tuesday that the Islamic State group must be wiped out. Paris has the second highest number of planes and troops -- after the U.S. –- involved in the coalition that has launched airstrikes against ISIS. Although ISIS has not claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, sympathizers of ISIS have spoken up in support of the Paris attackers.

“It is the same enemy. Our forces are on the ground here because ... for our troops it's the same fight,” Reuters quoted Le Drian as saying to Europe 1 radio. “Islamic State is a terrorist army with fighters from everywhere ... it is an international army that has to be wiped out and that is why we are part of the coalition.”