French authorities are still on the fence about the fate of the bodies of the three triggermen in the deadly Paris attacks - Saïd Kouachi, his brother Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly.

State prosecutors have not officially asked to bury them while the attackers' families have not spoken about how the bodies should be handled. The gunmen were killed in two separate shootouts last week. Their bodies have been stored in a Paris police morgue.

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Where the bodies eventually end up is a hard decision for authorities, which historically have performed Muslim rites even on those who carried out terrorist acts.

Under laws in France, if the manner of burying a body is not in a will, families are expected to step in with a burial request to the mayor of the place where they died or lived. Bodies can also be buried on their family's ancestral land or in a plot.

In 2012, a Frenchman with Algerian origins, Mohamed Merah, shot to death a rabbi, three children and three others at a Jewish learning center in Toulouse. Plans to bury him in Algeria fell through. Despite the mayor's opposition, he was eventually buried in an unmarked Muslim grave site in Cornebarrieu, near Toulouse, where he lived.

Following a U.S. Special Forces operation in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, Muslim burial rites were performed before he was lowered into the Arabian sea off an aircraft carrier. Authorities sought to prevent bin Laden's grave from becoming a shrine to his followers.

In April 2013, the unclaimed body of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had to be stored in a funeral home for almost a week. No community could be found that would accept it. His body ended up in a small Muslim cemetery in Virginia. Tsarnaev was killed as he attempted to escape authorities. 

TagsParis, Charlie Hebdo