Charlie Hebdo attack accomplices face trial five years on
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The Islamist gunmen who struck the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish store, killing 17, are dead but on Wednesday, five years after the attack that marked the onset of a wave of Islamist violence in France, their alleged accomplices face trial.
Fourteen defendants, three of whom will be tried in absentia and may be dead, face charges including financing terrorism, membership in a terrorist organisation and supplying weapons to the perpetrators: Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly.
A view of the courtroom in which the Charlie Hebdo terror attack trial will be held at the courthouse in Paris, France, 27 August 2020. The trial will be held from 02 September to 10 November 2020. The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris happened on 07 January 2015, with the storming of armed Islamist extremists of the satirical newspaper, starting three days of terror in the French capital. EPA-EFE/YOAN VALAT
On Jan. 7, 2015, the Kouachi brothers went on a killing spree in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, whose satire on race, religion and politics tested the limits of what society would accept in the name of free speech.
They killed 12 in an attack claimed by al Qaeda.
(L-R) A file picture combo shows French caricaturist Bernard Verlhac aka Tignous, Publishing director of the the French satirical newspaper ‘Charlie Hebdo’, Charb, French cartoonist Georges Wolinski and French caricaturist Cabu who were killed in the storming of armed Islamist extremists of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on 07 January 2015 starting three days of terror in the French capital. A total of 17 people lost their lives in attacks. EPA-EFE/TIM SOMERSET/YOAN VALAT/GUILLAUM
The following day, Coulibaly, an acquaintance of Cherif Kouachi, killed a female police officer. On Jan. 9, he killed four Jewish men at a kosher supermarket. In a video, he said he acted in the name of Islamic State.
More than 250 people have been killed in France in Islamist violence since the attacks and countering the threat remains a government priority, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin says.
Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch placed Charlie Hebdo’s then-director on its “wanted list” after the weekly published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad, including one of him in a bomb-shaped turban.
The magazine plans to re-publish the cartoons to coincide with the trial.
A wreath of flowers has been laid outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices in Paris. EPA-EFE/FRANCOIS GUILLOT / POOL
“We will never lie down. We will never give up,” editor Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau wrote.
President Emmanuel Macron said it was not for him to pass comment on the magazine’s editorial judgement and that the freedom to blaspheme went in hand in hand with the freedom of belief in France.
“Satire is not a discourse of hate,” the president told a news conference in Beirut.
Among those charged are Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly’s partner at the time of the attacks, and brothers Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine. All three travelled to areas of Syria under Islamic State’s control days before the attacks and may be dead.
The trial, which will run for 10 weeks and be filmed throughout, is likely to evoke painful memories.
Chloe Verlhac lost her husband, cartoonist Bernard Verlhac, known as “Tignous”, in the attack.
“He literally died with his felt-tip in his hand,” she told RTL radio. “He never let go.”
