A French court has convicted 14 people in connection with the January 2015 terrorist attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
A total of 17 people were killed over three days in a series of attacks that horrified the nation. The three assailants were shot dead by police, and only the trials were complicit.
Defendants were found guilty of various charges, ranging from belonging to a criminal network to complicity in the attacks. Terrorism-related charges were dropped for several defendants who were found guilty of misdemeanors.
Ali Riza Polat, who was described as a “fundamental axis” in the organization of the attacks, was found guilty of complicity in helping gunmen obtain weapons and ammunition.
The verdicts were announced by Régis de Jorna, the president of the special tribunal made up of five judges, after a 54-day hearing that put 11 people on the dock and tried three in their absence.
On January 7, 2015, at 11:30 a.m., brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi forcibly entered Charlie Hebdo’s offices in the 11th arrondissement of Paris.
They killed nine newspaper staff, as well as a building maintenance worker and a police officer. As they fled toward an escape vehicle, they stopped to kill a second police officer who was injured on the pavement. In a gruesome scene captured in the video, one of the brothers, hooded and dressed in black, turned to Ahmed Merabet and shot him nearby. Then they disappeared.
On Thursday, January 8, while continuing a major hunt for the Kouachi brothers, 32-year-old Amédy Coulibaly, who later expressed her allegiance to the Islamic State, shot Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a municipal police officer in practices.
The next day, shortly after the brothers were discovered in a printing press north of Paris, Coulibaly stormed the Hyper Cacher supermarket, killing four Jews and taking other employees and shoppers hostage. The three terrorists were shot dead by police in the following hours.
De Jorna said brothers Kouachi and Coulibaly were “part of the same synchronized team.” He added that while it had been difficult for police to establish how the brothers, who had used “irremediable” weapons, had prepared for their attack, Coulibaly had relied on “a circle of trusted individuals.” , including Polat, who he described as a “lifelong friend” of the supermarket gunman.
Polat had played a “particularly active and transversal” role in this circle and had given Coulibaly “logistical help that, because of his immediate proximity, allowed him to carry out his criminal actions,” De Jorna said. He added that the judges believed that Polat knew of Coulibaly’s “ideological” jihadist commitment and therefore of what he intended to do.
Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s former partner, was one of three suspects tried in absentia. Boumeddiene was found guilty of financing terrorism and belonging to a terrorist criminal network. She is believed to be alive and fleeing an international arrest warrant in Syria, where she joined Isis.
Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine, who also left France after the attacks and are believed to have died fighting Isis in Syria, were also prosecuted in his absence. Mohamed Belhoucine was convicted of complicity in the attacks.
Three of the defendants were found guilty of “association with terrorist offenders” and another seven were convicted of the misdemeanor of “association with criminals,” which ruled out their association with terrorism.
Charlie Hebdo’s attack had occurred on the day of his first weekly editorial meeting of the new year. The newspaper had moved to the offices on the second floor of Nicolas Appert Street after its previous facilities were destroyed by a bomb attack in 2011 following the decision to publish controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The decision to reprint the cartoons – seen as a defense of free speech by some and a provocation by others – still has repercussions today, seen recently in the assassination of Professor Samuel Paty by an Islamist terrorist in October 2020.
The attacks sparked an outpouring of international support in France as the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie spread online. World leaders gathered in Paris to march alongside then-President François Hollande. But more horror would come.
Ten months later, in November 2015, another group of terrorists launched a wave of shootings and suicide bombings in the city, killing 130 people, many of them shot at the Bataclan venue while enjoying a concert.
Since September this year, suspects accused of involvement in the January 2015 attacks have been prosecuted amid extreme security in a new court on the outskirts of Paris. The proceedings lasted more than three months and were the first to be filmed by “historical record”.
The court heard 144 witnesses, 14 experts and 200 interested persons, mostly friends and relatives of the victims, some of whose witnesses were silenced and in tears in the courtroom full of judges as they relived the horror of those three days. January.
Day after day, the statements of those who survived and the loved ones of those who did not, made a timid listen. Often those who were declaring stopped and stopped, seemingly lost in words: the voices of the living punctuated by the silence of the dead or the agony of the dying.
Forced to relive the events of January 7, 2015, when he lost colleagues and friends, Laurent Sourisseau, known as Riss, who now directs Charlie Hebdo, remembered the moment he thought he would die.
“I waited my turn. He often wonders how he will die. Me, I would die here, on the ground in Charlie Hebdo, in my diary. Filming continued. I wondered if I was going to shoot a bullet in the head, in the lungs, I counted the seconds because I said that every second that passes could be the last one, ”he told the court.
“Then it ended, not a sound, a total terrible silence.” There were bodies around him. “I did not want to see that. A few minutes before they were all there, all living. I made an effort not to look at the scene … I started to feel pain. “
Zarie Sibony, 28, Hyper Cacher cashier at the time of the attack, gave a creepy account of how Coulibaly threw himself into an anti-Semitic diatribe during the four-hour siege of the supermarket and how he asked her and other hostages if he had to do it ”. It’s over, ”said 20-year-old Yohan Cohen, who was dying on the floor. Coulibaly, annoyed by the moan of pain, shot and killed him anyway.
Simon Fieschi, the webmaster of Charlie Hebdo, was the first person shot by the Kouachis. Five years later, he still has almost constant pain. Fieschi spent eight months in hospital and then years of physiotherapy, but said he still has to work to overcome physical paralysis and debilitating fatigue. “I feel like describing those who escaped,” he told the court. “I do not feel that way. As far as I know, none of those who were there that day escaped what happened. “
Merabet’s three sisters explained how her murder had shattered her family and their lives, and silence fell when her partner, Morgane, addressed the defendant. “I lost everything. My life as a woman, my hopes, but I am here before you. I am standing and you will not have my hatred or my forgiveness, ”he said.