Those accused of complicity in the January 2015 Islamist attacks in France against the satirical weekly
Charlie Hebdo
and in the Jewish supermarket Hyper Cacher have been found guilty this Wednesday to sentences of between 4 and 30 years in prison.
The attacks left 17 dead in Paris and its periphery and opened a year of jihadist terror that culminated, 11 months later, in the attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, on several terraces in the French capital and on the Stade de France, in the neighboring town of Saint-Denis.
The three months that the trial lasted have been marked by three more jihadist attacks in the country and a national and international debate on freedom of expression, the right to blasphemy and the cartoons of Muhammad in
Charlie Hebdo.
Ali Riza Polat, the main defendant, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for complicity in terrorist crimes.
Of the 14 charged in the attack on
Charlie Hebdo
and the Hyper Cacher, three have been tried in absentia.
They include the only woman, Hayat Boumedienne, as well as brothers Mohamed and Medhi Belhoucine, who are suspected of having died in Syria after joining the Islamic State (ISIS).
The difficulty of the process consisted in determining the degree of complicity of the accused, since the three men who carried out the attacks - the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi and Amédy Coulibaly - were shot dead when confronting the police and the gendarmerie after committing the attacks.
Ali Riza Polat, the main defendant, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Two others, Amar Ramdani and Willy Prévost, have been sentenced for "association of terrorist criminals" to respective sentences of 20 and 13 years in prison.
The judges lowered the sentences of other defendants to "non-terrorist criminal association."
They are Saïd Makhlouf, Mohammed Farès, Abdelazis Abbad, Neetin Karasular, Michel Catino, Christophe Raumel and Miguel Martínez, who will have to serve sentences of between four and 10 years in prison.
The process for the attacks from January 7 to 9, 2015 has judged, first, the involvement of a whole network of traffickers and criminals who provided the weapons, equipment and financing that facilitated their crimes to the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly, according to the accusation.
The defense asked that no “whatever” culprits be sought to make up for the impossibility of convicting the Kouachi and Coulibaly.
The defendants maintained during the trial that they had nothing to do with it.
The trial has had something of catharsis for France because it has allowed to relive, and learn better, the details of those days and listen to the victims.
And because it has tragically coincided with a new wave of jihadist attacks in France, which had its most dramatic moment in the beheading of Professor Samuel Paty on October 16 by a jihadist of Chechen origin, and the attack in which a terrorist killed three people. with a knife in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice on the 29th of the same month.