French magazine offices gutted after putting Prophet Mohammed image on cover

PanARMENIAN.Net - The offices of a satirical French magazine were gutted on Wednesday, November 2, by what its editor said was a firebomb, after it put an image of the Prophet Mohammed on its cover, Reuters reports.

"The building is still standing. The problem is there's nothing left inside," Stephane Charbonnier, editor of the weekly Charlie Hebdo, told Europe 1 radio.

This week's edition shows a cartoon of Mohammed and a speech bubble with the words: "100 lashes if you don't die of laughter." It has the headline "Charia Hebdo," in a reference to Muslim sharia law, and says Mohammed guest-edited the issue.

A police source stopped short of blaming the blaze at the Paris offices on a firebomb and said it happened around 1 a.m. (midnight GMT), adding that no one had been injured.

The magazine had received many emails containing insults and threats in the past few days.

The magazine's website on Wednesday appeared to have been hacked and showed images of a mosque with the message "no god but allah."

Many Muslims find any image of the Prophet Mohammed offensive. The publication of a cartoon of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper in 2005 sparked angry protests across the Muslim world in which at least 50 people died.