Muslims victims of fanaticism: Hollande

President Francois Hollande has said France is "united in the face of terrorism" and that Muslims are the main victims of intolerance.

AAP

(AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere, Pool)

French President Francois Hollande has said Muslims are the "main victims" of fanaticism, as funerals were held in Paris for five of the 17 people killed in last week's Islamist attacks.

Speaking at the Arab World Institute in Paris, Hollande said on Thursday: "It is Muslims who are the main victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism and intolerance", adding the whole country was "united in the face of terrorism".

Members of France's Muslim community, Europe's largest, have "the same rights and the same duties as all citizens" and must be "protected", the president vowed.

The five buried included two of Charlie Hebdo's best-known cartoonists and Franck Brinsolaro, 49, a police protection officer killed in the satirical magazine's editorial meeting.

Even as the ceremonies took place, the magazine continued to fly off the shelves, sparking fury in some parts of the Muslim world for depicting the Prophet Mohammed on its cover.

Georges Wolinski, 80, and Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac, 57, who were gunned down by two Islamist brothers in the attack claimed by al-Qaeda, were buried at private family funerals.

Thousands braved drizzle outside the town hall memorial service for Tignous, laying flowers under a huge portrait of the cartoonist as his wife Chloe paid tribute inside.

His cartoon-covered coffin was carried through an applauding crowd for final burial, as people held aloft banners reading "Thank you Charlie Hebdo" and "Our heroes".

"It would really annoy you to see us here today with our long faces. We shouldn't be sad, but proud to have known you," said Coco, a fellow Charlie Hebdo cartoonist.

After the shooting at Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people died, the French rushed to get their hands on the "survivors' issue", which sold out on Wednesday before more copies of an eventual print run of five million hit newsstands.

"Charlie Hebdo is alive and will live on," Hollande said on Wednesday.

"You can murder men and women, but you can never kill their ideas," he said, declaring the previously struggling weekly "reborn".

The Charlie Hebdo assault on January 7 was followed two days later by an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris by a gunman claiming to have co-ordinated his actions with brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi.

In all, 17 people died over three days in the bloodiest attacks in France in half a century, which ended when police stormed two hostage sieges and killed all three gunmen.

Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen, where at least one of the Kouachi brothers trained, released a video Wednesday claiming responsibility for the attack, saying it was "vengeance" for the cartoons of the prophet.

The Afghan Taliban on Thursday condemned Charlie Hebdo's publication of further Mohammed cartoons and praised the gunmen.

Angry protests have been staged in countries from Pakistan and Turkey to the Philippines and Mauritania.

A Turkish court ordered a block on websites featuring images of the magazine cover and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Thursday described it as a "grave provocation", adding: "Freedom of the press does not mean freedom to insult."

But many have sought to calm tensions, with French Muslim leaders urging their communities to "stay calm and avoid emotive reactions".

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who will fly into Paris later Thursday to pay his respects to the dead, said he wanted to give the French capital a "big hug."


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Source: AAP



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