Charlie Hebdo: 10 years after the terrorist attack, former HR director of the satirical weekly still under police protection

Ten years after the terrorist attack at the office of the satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo, which took place in Paris on January 7, 2015, and claimed the lives of 12 people, the former HR director of the newsroom has confided to CNEWS about the life she has led since the tragedy.

"For ten years, I have been living under police protection and it is indispensable. When I think about it, it's abysmal," Marika Bret explained. "As soon as I leave my house, until I come in, it's surrounded by two police officers whom I thank every day for being there," she said.

"The Republic protects me, I thank it," added Marika Bret, who nevertheless deplored the threats to defenders of freedom of expression. "I filed a complaint only a few months ago for calls for rape on social networks," denounced the former director of human resources.

On the day of the attack, Marika Bret was absent from the editorial office. "I was at the bank, I had turned off my phone. When I turned it back on around 11:45 a.m., there were about twenty messages, after two messages, I understood," she said.

Among the victims, the cartoonist Charb, "I called him frantically for hours and then I ended up hearing the news from the police station of the 11th arrondissement. I screamed like never before in my life, I screamed," she confessed, her voice still full of emotion. "Charb had been threatened for years. He was on an al-Qaeda in Yemen file alongside Salman Rushdie: 'Wanted dead or alive for crimes against Islam'. All this meant that I was not surprised but that I was devastated," she said.

It was during the weekly editorial conference that the 2 terrorists, the Kouachi brothers, opened fire. Among the twelve people murdered were the cartoonists Cabu, Tignous, Honoré and Wolinski.

* CNEWS contributed to this article.