I think it's flagged because this type of news usually doesn't lead to interesting comments. Yes, freedom of speech is important and I suppose all readers feel sad about what happened, but what can we do about it? Three uneducated, brainwashed guys decided to kill satirists that offended them by making fun of their prophet a few years ago.

The problem lies in poverty, lack of education, propaganda... it's not going to be solved overnight. I just wonder who is leading this propaganda effort and trick those kids into murdering people. Is there an "evil brain" somewhere or is it some kind of "natural phenomenon" that feeds itself?

EDIT: not sure about the downvotes. Did I say something dumb? Living in France, my interpretation of the situation is that more and more teenagers or young adults are attracted to radical islam. This concerns usually people from the poorest neighbourhoods. Most of them aren't dangerous (even though it's quite shocking to read what they have to say on social networks). Atop of this, some get recruited by islamist organisation and are led to go to Syria for instance to fight there (A few hundreds according to the French government). Others are just lost people and commit terrorist attacks on their own behalf (like Merah http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mohammed_Merah a couple of years ago).

So one hand, we know there are islamist groups recruiting people to commit terrorist attacks, but also there's very clearly an overall rise of radical islam in France that catalyse crazy behaviours.