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  India   Tintin weeps as world puts arm around Belgium

Tintin weeps as world puts arm around Belgium

Published : Mar 23, 2016, 7:13 am IST
Updated : Mar 23, 2016, 7:13 am IST

Within hours of the attacks on Brussels Tuesday, tens of thousands of people were sharing images on social media of the country’s most famous creation in tears.

Within hours of the attacks on Brussels Tuesday, tens of thousands of people were sharing images on social media of the country’s most famous creation in tears.

With many invoking Herge’s cub reporter — who always got the better of the baddies in the end — one Twitter user put words into the boy hero’s mouth: “Let’s be strong, together and humane faced with these crazies.

“We are all Belgians,” said a user called Ulysse, as Paris and Berlin announced they would light up the Eiffel Tower and the Brandenburg Gate in the colours of the Belgian flag.

But the most shared image of all was one showing a figure dressed in French colours putting an arm around a crying Belgian flag.

The drawing by the acclaimed cartoonist Plantu of France’s Le Monde daily was captioned with the dates March 22 and November 13, the day 130 people died at the hands of jihadist gunmen and bombers in Paris.

As speculation turned to whether the same ISIS cell had planned the attacks on both cities, several other widely-shared cartoons took a more defiant and typically irreverent Belgian tone.

One showed a packet of fries, the country’s most famous street food, with one of them seemingly giving the terrorists the finger. “There are still 11 million of us,” a Brussels lawyer tweeted.

Location: France, Île-de-France, Paris