PARIS — More than 40 world leaders, including the Palestinian president and the Israeli prime minister, marched arm in arm in the vanguard of at least 1 million people in Paris on Sunday in a somber display of solidarity and defiance following a series of terrorist attacks that shook France.
The march, which began shortly after 3 p.m. at the Place de la République, clogged the broad streets as masses of people converged on the center of the capital to show their support after last week’s attacks, which killed 17 people, including three police officers. A police spokesman said more than 1 million people took part.
The attacks fanned anxieties about the effectiveness of the state security apparatus and stoked fears about a simmering clash between western European values of freedom of expression and religious extremism.
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But they also threw the country into mourning and sadness, evident in the faces of the many who wiped away tears, conveying the strong feelings of grief and despair after a week in which the country had experienced a sense of vulnerability in the face of such abject violence.
Dressed in dark coats, leaders from Europe to Africa, including President François Hollande of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, marched slowly and resolutely, sending a potent sign that the world was united and would not be intimidated in the face of terrorism. The crowd roared its approval.
Also in the front line of the dignitaries was Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, flanked closely by a bodyguard. In a rare display of unity, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, stood nearby.
The march served as a national catharsis after the outburst of terror. Families of the victims walked together, grim-faced and, in some cases, sobbing. Some held the names of their murdered loved ones on a piece of paper and wore white Charlie Hebdo headbands to commemorate the journalists massacred Wednesday at a satirical newspaper that repeatedly lampooned the Prophet Muhammad, drawing the rage of Islamic extremists.
The crowd — like the victims of this week’s attacks — included Jews as well as Muslims, some of whom said they were determined to show that the terrorists had not acted in their names. While the rally was peaceful, a few people were seen holding placards attacking political Islam.
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“Indignation. Resistance. Solidarity. I am Charlie,” read an invitation to the event that circulated on social media.
Mireille Bournaud, 63, a retired professor of mathematics, said she feared a backlash against France’s large Muslim community.
“We reject any conflation between Arab Muslims and terrorists,” she said. “My daughter will marry a Muslim man in a month, and I don’t want him to suffer from this confusion.”
At the Place de la République, demonstrators waved French flags and several climbed the imposing Statue of the Republic, a symbol of the republic and the French Revolution, and wielded an inflatable pencil, symbolizing solidarity with the fallen cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo.
People displayed the flags of countries from Morocco to Spain and many held signs saying, “I am Charlie.” Others held up caricatures from the magazine. One demonstrator captured the national mood in a sign: “17 dead. 66 million people hurt.”
Before the march, the French Interior Ministry held a security summit meeting, bringing together top intelligence and law enforcement officials from across Europe and North America, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., to discuss ways to combat and contain terrorism.
After the meeting, Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, said European legislation aimed at fighting terrorism “wasn’t enough,” and called for a better European system for tracking potential jihadists and terrorists. He also said the European ministers had agreed on a need for better cooperation with Internet companies to monitor, detect and remove any “illicit” material that could encourage terrorism.
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Holder announced that the White House would convene an international forum on Feb. 18 to discuss new means of countering terrorism. The White House, in a statement, said the meeting would address domestic and international measures “to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting, or inspiring individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence.”
Holder did not participate in the rally and march; the United States was represented by its ambassador, Jane Hartley.
The mass rally created a major security headache for the French authorities, two days after security forces killed Amedy Coulibaly, a heavily armed gunman who is suspected of shooting and killing four hostages at a kosher supermarket near Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris. Two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who are suspected of killing 12 people on Wednesday at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, were also killed.
The French government mobilized hundreds of military forces, police and anti-terrorism squads to provide security at the rally. Snipers looked down from rooftops, plainclothes officers mingled among the crowd and security officers were seen checking sewers for explosives. Numerous subway stops and streets were closed off because of the immense throng.
While the rally was intended to help unite the country, it has fanned some divisions. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, who was not invited, urged her followers to stay away, saying that the demonstration had been usurped for political ends, “by parties which represent what the French hate: partisan spirit, electioneering and indecent polemic.”
Agence France-Presse reported that a group called the Collective Against Islamophobia refused to participate in Sunday’s rally, citing Netanyahu’s presence at the event, calling him a “racist against Arabs, blacks and Muslims” and saying he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Palestinians.
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The terror attacks in Paris have stoked deep anxiety among the Jewish community in France, the largest in Europe. It was already reeling from a spate of anti-Semitic attacks, including on synagogues and Jewish shops last year, at the time of an Israeli incursion in Gaza.
On Sunday, Hollande, who has labeled the attack at a kosher supermarket Friday that left four Jewish shoppers dead a horrific act of anti-Semitism, attended a ceremony with Netanyahu at Grande Synagogue de Paris, to convey his strong support.
In a meeting earlier Sunday with Roger Cukierman, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, Hollande said that the government would protect Jewish schools and synagogues with troops if necessary, and that it was committed to the security of France’s 500,000 Jews.
But deep fears remain. Cukierman emphasized that French Jews were committed to France, but he said he understood why parents afraid of sending their children to school were emigrating to Israel, where Netanyahu said Sunday they would be welcome with “open arms.”
Cukierman noted other violent acts against Jews in recent years, including the 2012 attack at a Jewish school by Mohammad Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origins who killed seven people, including three Jewish children, in Toulouse.
He said that the attacks could prompt more Jews to leave France.
“I can understand why parents, who can’t send their children to school anymore because their children become targets, want to seek refuge elsewhere,” he said.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared Saturday that France was at “war” with radical Islam after the harrowing attacks. The three gunmen who said they were acting on behalf of al-Qaida and other radical Islamist groups were killed by the police on Friday in two separate raids. One gunman had taken hostages at a Jewish supermarket in Paris, and the two others had holed themselves up in a print shop in Dammartin-en-Goële, northeast of the French capital.
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Netanyahu’s office announced on Twitter that the prime minister would bring the bodies of the Jewish victims of the kosher supermarket siege to Jerusalem for burial. The funerals are tentatively planned for Tuesday.
A lawyer for Izzana Hamyd, the wife of Chérif Kouachi, one of the brothers behind the attack at Charlie Hebdo, said she condemned her husband’s actions, AFP reported. Her lawyer, Christian Saint-Palais, said Hamyd, who had been detained by the police for questioning, had expressed sympathy for the victims. He said she never saw any sign in Kouachi to suggest that he would commit terrorist acts, and said she was “stupefied” by the action, the news agency said.
The trail of terror was extended Sunday when the Paris prosecutor’s office said that ballistics tests on bullet casings had connected a gun of Coulibaly’s found in the kosher supermarket to the shooting of a man who was jogging in a Paris suburb Wednesday. The jogger survived. Coulibaly is also believed to be the man who assassinated a female police officer in Paris on Thursday.
Security officials in France and across Europe remained on high alert for copycat attacks, even as a French prosecutor said that five people detained in the wake of the terrorist attacks had been released.
Early Sunday, a German newspaper that had reprinted cartoons from the French weekly Charlie Hebdo lampooning the Prophet Muhammad was the target of an apparent arson attack, the newspaper reported on its website. It said there were no injuries. The daily, the Hamburger Morgenpost, had published three cartoons that had been previously published by Charlie Hebdo, whose offices were attacked Wednesday in Paris. “This much freedom must be possible!” the headline read.
The Associated Press, citing police sources, said that the police in Germany had detained two men in connection with the Hamburger Morgenpost attack.
Several other national and local German newspapers published the cartoons and were placed under police protection, the news agency reported. Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper that news reports said had published cartoons previously published by Charlie Hebdo, reported that it had evacuated its Brussels offices after receiving a threatening phone call.
Counterterrorism officials in France said they were continuing to investigate links between Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers, the source of their funding and weapons, and whether the suspects were part of a dormant sleeper cell that had been activated.
The investigation is a challenge for French law enforcement officials, who are already grappling with the more than 1,000 French citizens who last year went or planned to join jihadists in Syria and Iraq. The events of the past week appear to confirm fears that some could return to wage attacks on French soil. They have fanned anxieties across France and Europe and raised questions about why the authorities had failed to thwart an attack by suspects who were known to the French security services.
The French National Assembly is to hold a debate and vote Tuesday on whether France should continue participating in U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq against the Islamic State.
France joined the campaign in September, and Islamic State militants have asked their supporters to attack Europeans in retaliation for the strikes. In September, a group aligned with the Islamic State beheaded Hervé Gourdel, a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from the French city of Nice, who had been kidnapped by fighters in Algeria.