One of Charlie Hebdo’s most outspoken journalists has said she is leaving the French satirical magazine because it has gone soft on Islamic extremism.



Zineb El Rhazoui accused the weekly of bowing to Islamic extremists and no longer daring to draw the prophet Muhammad.

Her parting shot comes on the eve of the second anniversary of the jihadi massacre in Paris that almost wiped out the magazine’s staff. “Charlie Hebdo died on 7 January [2015],” the day the gunmen attacked the magazine, killing 12 people, Rhazoui told Agence France-Presse.

Rhazoui, 35, who is followed everywhere by police bodyguards and is known as the most protected woman in France, also questioned the magazine’s “capacity to carry the torch of irreverence and absolute liberty”. She said: “Freedom at any cost is what I loved about Charlie Hebdo, where I worked through great adversity.”

Rhazoui first said in September that she would be leaving, after the magazine was hit by a series of internal disputes and the departures of the cartoonist Luz and the columnist Patrick Pelloux. But she did not spell out the reasons for her exit, except to say it was “not the same after the loss of so many of the original [staff]”.

Charlie Hebdo first attracted the ire of Islamic extremists in 2006 when it republished Danish cartoons of Muhammad and put a cartoon of him on its cover.



The magazine’s editor, Riss, who took over from Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, who was murdered in the attack, said: “We get the impression that people have become even more intolerant of Charlie,” he said. “If we did a front cover showing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad now, who would defend us?”

Last year, he said he would no longer draw Muhammad. “We’ve done our job. We have defended the right to caricature,” he said.

Rhazoui, who was in Morocco at the time of the attack, said she has “not written a line” for the magazine for a year, although she has published two books, the latest of which is called Destroy Islamic Fascism.