Yemen’s branch of al-Qaida on Wednesday claimed responsibility for last week’s massacre at a Paris satirical newspaper, with one of its top commanders professing that the assault was in revenge for the weekly’s publications of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which they considered an insult in Islam. AP reports:
The claim came in a video posting by Nasr al-Ansi, a top commander of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which appeared on the group’s Twitter account. The video was the group’s official claim of the assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices, although a member of AQAP, as the branch is known, last Friday first confirmed to The Associated Press that the branch had carried out the attack.
In the 11-minute video, al-Ansi says the Charlie Hebdo attack, which killed 12 people — including editors, cartoonists and journalists, as well as two police officers — was in “revenge for the prophet.”
He said AQAP, as the branch is known, “chose the target, laid out the plan and financed the operation” against the weekly, though he produced no evidence to support the claim.
Orders he said, came from al-Qaida’s top leader Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s successor. The attack on the weekly was the beginning of three days of terror in France that saw 17 people killed before the three Islamic extremist attackers were gunned down by security forces.
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