Young mother let terrorists into Charlie Hebdo building after threat against daughter
Masked terrorists entered the office building in Paris where they murdered 12 people Wednesday by threatening a young mother and her daughter, she said.
Corinne Rey, a cartoonist for the weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, says she was forced to enter the security code after returning from picking up her child at daycare, according to a local report.
“I just went to get my daughter from daycare. As I got to the front door of the building, two masked, armed gunmen brutally threatened us,” she told L'Humanité. “They wanted to enter, go up. I typed the code.”
Rey, who goes by “Coco,” said she hid under a desk while the gunmen shot and killed a dozen staffers inside the office.
While crouched down on the ground, she saw the men kill fellow cartoonists Georges Wolinski and Jean Cabut, the French paper reported.
"They shot Wolinski and Cabut," she said. "It lasted five minutes.”
The terrorists, claiming to be with al-Qaida, spoke fluent, unaccented French, according to Rey.
The Charlie Hebdo newspaper regularly satirizes religious and political figures.
Terrorists have threatened the publication’s staff with violence numerous times for its depictions of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
Its offices were firebombed in 2011 after an issue featured a caricature of the prophet on its cover, the Associated Press reported.
Undeterred, Charlie Hebdo published another illustration of Muhammad a year later and a cartoon titled “Still No Attacks in France” featuring a jihadist this week.
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