On Charlie Hebdo attack anniversary, Hollande lays wreath

It was a very different atmosphere than past year when, on the Sunday following the January attacks, more than one million people filled the square in a demonstration of unity and solidarity.

Eleven months before, the calm was broken in Paris after armed men reportedly followers of the IS killed 17 people in separate attacks targeting Charlie Hebdo, a magazine known for mocking politicians and religious leaders and a kosher supermarket.

Thursday’s drama unfolded just moments after President Francois Hollande concluded a sombre speech at police headquarters to mark the anniversary of the attack on the Paris office of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015.

French rocker and national icon Johnny Hallyday is joining the army choir in a special, somber musical performance.

French police shot dead a knife-wielding attacker in Paris on Thursday, as the country marked the first anniversary of deadly attacks in the French capital that sent shockwaves across Europe.

Local journalist Anna Polonyi, an editor at the International New York Times, could see the attack from her flat and posted photos to social media showing what appeared to be a bomb-disposal robot near the body of the suspect. France honors today the victims killed in extremist attacks in Paris in 2015.

French President Francois Hollande and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo laid a wreath by the statue of Marianne, symbol of the French republic, in central Paris.

Instead, police are “working on the hypothesis” that the assailant is a man who was involved in a minor 2013 robbery in the southern Var region, according to a French security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.

Hollande responded to the November massacre by vowing to crush Isis, and French jets have been bombing the group in Syria and Iraq.

Belgian investigators said they believed explosives used in the November Paris attacks may have been made in an apartment in Brussels that was rented under a false name and where a fingerprint of a key fugitive was found. Police found material that could be used to make explosives, traces of explosive acetone peroxide and handmade belts during a raid on the apartment on December 10.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised the “remarkable work” of the security forces in the incident.

“We are facing an extremely high level of threat, higher than it has ever been”, Cazeneuve said on iTELE television.