A French police officer in charge of security for Charlie Hebdo managing editor Riss has been relieved of duty after investigators found he had viewed radical Islamic material and feared he may have become radicalised himself.
The officer, who was a member of the Service de la protection (SDLP) which protects high-profile dignitaries, was suspected of radicalisation following concerns from the Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI), France’s domestic intelligence agency, BFMTV reports.
The DGSI found that the officer, who is a Muslim, had viewed and interacted with known Islamist websites and said that the officer’s colleagues had reported a change in his behaviour which they labelled as “disturbing”.
A source from within the police said that the evidence proved that the policeman was “incompatible” with the task of protecting the Charlie Hebdo writer who, along with his colleagues, was targetted for death by radical Islamic terrorists in January 2015.
Riss had been shot in the shoulder while 12 others were killed, the majority of whom being the staff of the satirical newspaper.
The officer is planning to appeal the decision to remove him from his assignment, according to the officer’s lawyer who said that a formal complaint had been filed.
The officer previously protected imam of Drancy Hassen Chalghoumi who was targetted in 2010 by radicals over his support for banning the full-face Islamic veil which was proposed and passed by former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The issue of the Islamic veil ban was recently brought back into public debate in France following a United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee report which denounced it as a violation of human rights. The UN has given France six months to revise the ban which has been in place since 2010.
While Charlie Hebdo has not been directly targetted by radical Islamists since 2015, the magazine has received a number of threats including a bomb threat following an issue which mocked the ban on the sharia-compliant swimwear known as the “burkini”.