Rresponsible for the Charlie Hebdo website at the time of the January 2015 attack, Simon Fieschi, whose death at the age of 40 was announced on Saturday, was seriously injured during this attack and described himself as “survivor”.
The Paris prosecutor’s office announced the opening of an investigation to investigate the causes of his death, without favoring any hypothesis at this stage, while his lifeless body was found this week in a hotel room.
This father, married to an Australian, was the first person affected during the jihadist attack carried out against the satirical weekly, to which he subsequently continued to collaborate part-time.
Moving with a crutch, he recently appeared at the trial of Peter Cherif, sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in organizing this attack perpetrated by the Kouachi brothers.
Unlike the other civil parties, he explained that he had “all the answers” he wanted during the hearings, despite the silence of the accused on his exact role with the attackers, almost ten years after the events.
In 2020, during the first trial of this attack, Simon Fieschi, who had lost seven centimeters due to a Kalashnikov bullet fired at point blank range and lodged in his spine, spoke of life afterward, while He spent nine months in hospital following the attack.
“The pain is lifelong. We can’t get rid of it. (…) From now on, I have to do re-education work for life,” he told the Paris Special Assize Court.
“Psychic effort”
“I am in post-trauma and I will stay there for the rest of my life. (…) It’s an everyday mental effort, an abysmal fatigue,” he continued, evoking pell-mell the “tremors” in the legs, the “loss of motor skills,” the “difficulties concentrating,” “ episodes of sadness and anger”…
After wanting to pursue a career in the gendarmerie as a teenager, he joined Charlie Hebdo in 2012 “to take care of the website and social networks”, according to his biography published on the weekly’s website.
Described as loving the musician Keith Jarret, the comic book hero Gaston Lagaffe and the philosopher Emil Cioran, he also spoke in schools to share his story.
In front of high school students, he said he felt “survivor’s guilt”.
“I coped differently because I was injured. I felt like I had paid the fare. We often see a reversal of guilt: it’s as if it was the fault of the person who took the bullet and not the person who shot it. We were attacked for what we did: didn’t we look for it a little? At the trial, the innocent feel bad and those who do not feel guilty are in the box,” he declared, according to comments transcribed on the website of the French Association of Victims of Terrorism.
After the announcement of his death, many reactions flooded into social networks to salute his memory.
The editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo said it was “devastated by the death of (his) friend”, described as “funny, lively, tireless defender of freedom”, in a message on X.
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