Charlie Hebdo: French magazine’s head of HR ‘forced out of home’

Charlie Hebdo magazine’s head of HR has left her home because of “precise and detailed threats” to her security guards, French media report.

Marika Bret said her guards, who have protected her for almost five years, received the threats on 14 September.

She blamed “a level of hallucinatory hatred around Charlie Hebdo”.

The magazine was the target of a deadly terror attack in January 2015, in which 12 people were killed, after publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The attacks began a wave of jihadist strikes across France.

Earlier this month the magazine republished the controversial cartoons, ahead of 14 people going on trial accused of assisting the two gunmen in that attack.

Speaking to Le Point magazine, Ms Bret said: “I had 10 minutes to do my business and leave my home, 10 minutes to give up part of my existence… I won’t be coming home.”

She added that the threats started again with the start of the trial and the republication of the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed earlier this month.

“Since the start of the trial and with the republication of the cartoons, we have received all kinds of horrors, including threats from al-Qaeda and calls to finish the work of the [gunmen from the 2015 attack],” she said.

The front cover of the issue of Charlie Hebdo published at the start of September featured the 12 original cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, which were published in a Danish newspaper before appearing in Charlie Hebdo.

One of the cartoons shows the prophet wearing a bomb instead of a turban. The French headline reads “Tout ça pour ça” (“All of that for this”).

In its editorial, the magazine said that it had often been asked to carry on printing caricatures of the prophet since the 2015 killings.

“We have always refused to do so, not because it is prohibited – the law allows us to do so – but because there was a need for a good reason to do it, a reason which has meaning and which brings something to the debate,” it said.

“To reproduce these cartoons in the week the trial over the January 2015 terrorist attacks opens seemed essential to us.”