The wave of terror spanning three days in January 2015 saw a total of 17 people killed. It started on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi went on a gun rampage in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly magazine that is known for its cartoons on religion and politics. They killed 12 people, including an officer who was patrolling the area. They targeted the paper for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen, and François-Michel Saada, four French Jews were killed in the terror attack against a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015. They were shopping in the Hyper Cacher store. All four were buried in Jerusalem.
The wave of terror spanning three days in January 2015 saw a total of 17 people killed. It started on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi went on a gun rampage in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly magazine that is known for its cartoons on religion and politics. They killed 12 people, including an officer who was patrolling the area. They targeted the paper for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
Over the following two days a third gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, an islamist terrorist, killed a policewoman in the Montrouge suburb south of Paris where authorities think he may have initially been targeting a nearby Jewish school. He then killed the four people at the Hyper Cacher, during a hostage standoff with police.
All three terrorists were killed by police.
A special Paris criminal court will start hearing on Wednesday the case against 14 people accused of helping the attackers, providing them with logistical support by providing weapons and vehicles. They could face between 10 years in prison and life imprisonment.
But only 11 suspects will be present. The three others are being tried in absentia and are believed to have fled to northern Syria and Iraq, which was at the time under the control of the so-called Islamic State (IS) group. It is unknown if they are still alive, including Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly’s ex-wife.The Paris court is prosecuting her for “criminal terrorist association,” which is punishable by a 20-year jail term. She is also accused of financing terrorism for mounting several scams to help her husband pay for the logistics of the attacks.
Boumedienne appeared on the radar in October 2019 and was at the time reported as alive.
Among those who will appear before the court, Ali Riza Polat, a Franco-Turk citizen faces the most serious sentence of life imprisonment for his complicity. He is suspected of having a key role in aiding the attacks “at all stages of the preparation”, including helping to build weapons.
He reportedly had a close relationship with Coulibaly.
Mohamed Belhoucine faces the most serious charge of “complicity in terrorist crimes”.
Authorities believe he was an ideological mentor for Coulibaly. They met at a prison in Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. He allegedly opened the channels of communication for him to be in contact with the Islamic State terror group and wrote the oath of allegiance that Coulibaly made to the IS.
Commenting the start of the trial, which is expected to last until November, the President of UEJF, the French Jewish Students’ Union, Noemi Madar, declared: ‘’This trial is a moment to judge this part of French history” and “to be able to return to the situation and understand, five years later, what has changed, how the French State has committed itself to freedom of expression and security for French Jews.”
To mark the start of the trial, Charlie Hebdo decided to republish the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed that had unleashed a storm of anger and blasphemy charges across the Muslim world. “We’ll never go to bed. We will never give up,” said the newspaper’s publishing director.
Speaking on French radio, France’s anti-terror Prosecutor Jean-François Ricard dismissed claims that the defendants were just “little helpers” going on trial. “It’s about individuals who are involved in the logistics, the preparation of the events, who provided means of financing, operational material, weapons, a residence,” he said. “All this is essential to the terrorist action.”