Jeannette Bougrab was the girlfriend of Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier and she spoke out about the murders.
In emotional interviews, 41-year-old Jeannette Bougrab said: ‘I always knew he was going to die like Theo Van Gogh (the Dutch cartoonist murdered in 2004).’
‘I begged him to leave France but he wouldn’t. My companion is dead because he drew in a newspaper.’
Miss Bougrab, who had lived with Charb and her adopted daughter May for three years, added sadly: ‘He never had children because he knew he was going to die. He lived without fear, but he knew he would die.’
Proudly, Bougrab added: ‘He died standing.
‘He defended secularism. He defended the spirit of Voltaire. He, in fact, was really the fruit of this ideal of the Republic that we’ve almost forgotten.
‘He died, executed with his comrades, as he would say.’
Bougrab, a member of the French National Council of State who served under Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration has been described as a ‘hard secularist’.