Charlie Hebdo trial: 14 found guilty over 2015 Paris terror attacks

A Paris court has found 14 people guilty of being accomplices in terrorist attacks in France in 2015, including the attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The January 2015 attacks on the satirical magazine, a policewoman and a Jewish supermarket left 17 people dead.

Eleven defendants appeared in court for the verdict on Wednesday, and three were tried in absentia.

The other three including the fugitive widow of a so-called Islamic State gunman were tried in their absence.

The verdict ends the three-month trial of the 14 people linked to the three days of killings across Paris claimed jointly by so-called Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Hayat Boumeddiene, the widow of Amedy Coulibaly - who killed a policewoman and then four people in a Jewish supermarket, fled to Syria and is believed to still be alive.

The two men, who helped her to flee from France - Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine - were also tried in their absence and are thought to be dead.

Meanwhile 11 others were present and all were convicted of the crime, with sentences ranging from 30 years for Ali Riza Polat, to four years with a simple criminal conviction.

It was the coronavirus infection of Polat, who is described as the lieutenant of the virulently anti-Semitic market attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, that forced the suspension of the trial for a month.

The three attackers - brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, and Amedy Coulibaly - were all killed by police.

Those convicted on Wednesday have all been found guilty of helping to arrange, fund and support the terrorist attacks.

Polat’s profane outbursts and insults drew rebukes from the chief judge.

A handwriting expert testified it was Polat who scrawled a price list of arms and munitions linked to the attack.

The minimum sentence requested by prosecutors is five years.

Among those giving evidence were the widows of Cherif and Said Kouachi, the brothers who stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices on January 7 2015, decimating the newspaper’s editorial staff in what they said was an act of vengeance for its publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad years before.

The offices had been firebombed before and were unmarked, and editors had round the clock protection – but it was not enough as 12 people died in that attack.

The next day, Coulibaly shot and killed a young policewoman after failing to attack a Jewish community centre in the suburb of Montrouge. By then, the Kouachis were on the run.

Authorities did not link the shooting to the massacre at Charlie Hebdo immediately.

They were closing in on the fugitive brothers when the first alerts came of a gunman inside a kosher supermarket.

Coulibaly entered, carrying an assault rifle, pistols and explosives.

With a GoPro camera fixed to his torso, he methodically fired on an employee and a customer, then killed a second customer before ordering a cashier to close the store’s metal blinds, images shown to a hushed courtroom.

"You are Jews and French, the two things I hate the most," Coulibaly told them.

The Kouachi brothers were cornered in a printing shop with their own hostages, and in the end all three attackers died in near-simultaneous police raids. 

It was the first attack in Europe claimed by the so-called Islamic State, which struck Paris again later that year to even deadlier effect.

At the heart of the trial is who helped them and how.

Prosecutors said the Kouachis essentially self-financed their attack, while Coulibaly and his wife took out fraudulent loans.