Coming to HBO tonight, Monday, September 19: THREE DAYS OF TERROR: THE CHARLIE HEBDO ATTACKS
Dan Reed’s in-the-moment retelling of the January 2015 Paris terrorist actions debuted on the BBC on the anniversary of the attacks. It now makes its debut as part of HBO’s long-running Monday night doc programming.
On January 7, 2015, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi stormed through the building housing the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine that had published cartoons controversially depicting the prophet Muhammad, to avenge the perceived slight to Islam. These French-born Yemeni Al-Qaeda members murdered eleven people, injured another eleven, and then killed a police officer as they made their temporary escape. Within two days, they were killed by police after a hostage situation. Elsewhere in the city, a former prison friend of the brothers, another French-born man, Amedy Coulibaly, shot a policewoman before himself taking hostages at a kosher supermarket, killing four of them before police stopped him. Reed powerfully relates these harrowing incidents through eye-witness testimony and chilling cameraphone footage, drawing viewers into the experiences as they took place, with disturbing clarity.
what (not) to doc 