Veteran CNN anchor leaves after Twitter mess

After a slew of tweets about the terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, veteran CNN anchor Jim Clancy has left the network.

On the day of the attack, Clancy took to the micro-blogging site and wrote about the cartoons the paper had published depicting the Prophet, and started sparring with other Twitter users.

Clancy’s Twitter account has since been deleted, but not before the tweets were published on several websites, including Gawker, Twitchy and Mediaite.

While CNN confirmed on Saturday that Clancy had left the network, it declined to comment on whether his departure was related to the Twitter messages.

Clancy posted a message about cartoons Charlie Hebdo published on Jan. 7, days before the massacre.

“The cartoons NEVER mocked the Prophet,” he said. “They mocked how the COWARDS tried to distort his word.” The message was retweeted more than 600 times.

Some called Clancy’s statement untrue.

One was Oren Kessler, a research director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which studies international terrorism. He responded with a tweet that said, “The magazine was targeted in the past over an issue in which Muhammad was listed as guest editor.”

Clancy then posted a series of tweets including, “These accounts are part of a campaign to do PR for #Israel @JewsMakingNews @elderofziyon Nothing illegal – but PR not HR: Human Rights.”

Clancy, a CNN veteran for over 30 years, anchored the global news show “The Brief,” and hadn covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Rwandan genocide and the Iraq wars, according to a biography that has since his departure been deleted from CNN’s website.