Charlie Hebdo founder: Editor "dragged team to their deaths"

Charlie Hebdo founder: Editor "dragged team to their deaths"

PARIS -- A founder of Charlie Hebdo has condemned the murdered editor Stephane Charbonnier of "dragging the team" to their deaths, RT is reporting.

According to the report, Henri Roussel suggested that Charbonnier did so "by overdoing the satirical magazine's provocative cartoons."

80-year-old Roussel participated in 1970 in the creation of the first issue of Charlie Hebdo (then called Hara-Kiri-Hebdo) and now "addressed Charbonnier posthumously with the words, 'I really hold it against you'," RT said.

The column appeared in a column in the left-wing magazine Nouvel Obs.

Roussel, who writes under the pen name Delfeil de Ton, said that Charbonnier was "an amazing lad, but also an obstinate blockhead."

"What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it?," he asked, referring to the 2011 Mohammed cartoons.

Richard Malka, Charlie Hebdo's lawyer, responded by writing to one of the Nouvel Obs owners, Mathieu Pigasse:

"Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs finds nothing better to do that to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him. The other day, the editor of Nouvel Obs, Matthieu Croissandeau, couldn't shed enough tears to say he would continue the fight. I didn't know he meant it this way. I refuse to allow myself to be invaded by bad thoughts, but my disappointment is immense."