I can't add much to the other comments. In this case, I actually hadn't heard about the false flag conspiracy theories. I was thinking about the less extreme tendency of the foreign press to see the occurrence of blasphemy as being secretly orchestrated by Western governments, who them deny involvement and claim that they are just supporting the spontaneous actions of their citizens. My theory is that this will seem more plausible to people living in areas with more state control over the press. For example, there was an American preacher who burned some Korans. The view from within the United States was this man was a low-status Southern Evangelical stereotype, a headache to the government, and a visible annoyance to the high-status people who really do love insulting Islam but were somehow stuck defending this guy instead of some more charismatic blasphemer. In the Islamic press, this guy was a practically a CIA agent/preacher of the Official American Church acting on Presidential orders, probably working with Israel to further some foreign policy aim. Because if he really was a headache to the government, why wasn't he already in jail?

I don't know about killing the agents, but there have been known examples of that kind of false flag terrorist attack. Probably the most famous is the Lavon Affair, but there's also: * Operation Himmler. * The Panda Bar Incident. * The Miami Showband murders, although that was carried out by rogue soldiers rather than centrally directed. There have also been a number of false-flag incidents in which a government attacked its own people with terrorism, but, whether by luck or by intention, no-one died: * Operation Labrador. * The Mukden Incident. * Celle Hole. There are also various well-known incidents that look like false flag terrorist attacks by a government on its own people, but which are disputed: * The Baghdad Bombings (very similar to the Lavon Affair, but still denied). * The Reichstag Fire. * There are persistent and credible allegations that the DRS carried out false-flag terrorist attacks during the Algerian Civil War. * It is possible that the 1999 bombings in Russia were a false-flag attack, but this incident is so bitterly contested that it's impossible for me to know what to make of these allegations. It is also possible that there were other such incidents but where the false-flag activity went undetected. Overall, such false-flag attacks seem to be extremely rare, but not unknown. They seem to normally occur in the context of an existing violent conflict. As we have no particular evidence that the Charlie Hebdo attacks were a false-flag operation, our prior that the French government was involved should be extremely low.