Charlie Hebdo HR director flees home due to threats

Paris, Sep 22 (efe-epa).- Charlie Hebdo’s human resources director was forced to flee her home last week because of threats against her, it emerged on Tuesday.

It came on the third week of the trial into a 2015 terror attack on the satirical magazine.

Marika Bret told France Info radio station the threats were so serious that police officers protecting her warned her on Monday last week that she had “10 minutes to prepare a bag and leave my home”.

Details of the threats have not been made public for security reasons.

Bret added that she went to stay with friends and that she arrived there as a “political refugee”.

She said she has been under the protection of law enforcement for five years and has been warned by officers that “I will probably never return to my home”.

She explained that she had decided to make her situation public to “show what climate of hate we are in and what the consequences of that climate are”.

Charlie Hebdo sparked protests across the Muslim world in 2006 when it published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed, which it has repeated on several occasions since then, including on the first day of the trial at the beginning of this month.

On the morning of 7 January 2015, two gunmen walked into the publication’s Paris headquarters and shot 12 people dead.

Over the next two days, a third attacker killed four others and took hostages at a nearby Jewish supermarket.