The head of Charlie Hebdo has blasted leftists and others in a new book about the 2015 radical Islamic terror attack on the satirical French magazine’s office.
Laurent Sourisseau, more commonly known in France as Riss, tells the story of the terror attack in January 2015 that claimed the lives of 12 people, the majority his fellow Charlie Hebdo writers and cartoonists, France Inter reports.
While the book, titled One Minute Forty-Nine Seconds, describes the moments of the attack, part of the book also speaks out against the Islamic radicals who sought to silence the satirical magazine through violence.
Riss’s anger also targets those he terms “collabos” or collaborators. He includes several categories of people such as “the reactionary Muslims, the Trotsky-Stalinists, the cowards, the followers of secularism, the informers of Islamophobia”, as part of the collabos.
He also described the direct aftermath of the shooting as he saw the body of one of the victims saying: “He was a 25-year-old friend. To reach the exit, I had no alternative but to step over him. Assisted by the fireman, I resolved to this gesture that made me ashamed. I ask you a thousand times for forgiveness, my friend, but I could not do otherwise.”
In a prior interview with French magazine Le Point, Riss expressed little hope that anything has changed since 2015, saying: “If we republished the cartoons today, we would be alone again, the attack did not make people more courageous, on the contrary.”
Despite the attack, Charlie Hebdo has continued to satirise and lampoon anyone and everyone on the political scene in France and has received backlash several times, including death threats over a cover involving Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan in 2017.
While the magazine does still take risks on its content, former Charlie Hebdo journalist Zineb El Rhazoui said in 2017 that the magazine had lost its edge and “gone soft”.