Charlie Hebdo columnist Elsa Cayat was targeted because she was Jewish, her cousin said. Photo: Twitter

The sole woman killed in the massacre at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday was targeted because she was a Jew, her cousin has asserted.

Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett, Sophie Bramly, the cousin of Jewish Charlie Hebdo columnist Elsa Cayat, was asked whether she believed that Cayat had been “specifically targeted.”

“Yes, I do,” Bramley responded. “They spared all the women, and she was the only one killed, and she was the only one Jewish.”

Bramley added that Cayat’s brother had told her that the columnist had been receiving threatening phone calls for “a while.”

“Anonymous phone calls, obviously, and I can’t say that it was the same team of people,” Bramley, a film producer, said, “but the calls were saying basically, ‘Dirty Jew, you should stop working for Charlie Hebdo, otherwise we’re going to kill you.’ So if you put two and two together, it seems like, yeah, she was definitely killed because she was Jewish.”

That realization, Bramley continued, “makes it even worse, because the press hasn’t really talked about it that way here. It was only about freedom of speech that was attacked, and my feeling was that religion was there too.”

The deaths of the four Jewish hostages at the HyperCacher market siege “unfortunately proved that I wasn’t totally wrong,” Bramley observed.