Paris: In the midst of a great media publicity, the trial for the terrorist attacks of 2015, which left 17 dead in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, a Jewish market and the town of Montrouge, begins today in this capital, Prensa Latina publishes.
The three criminals who pulled the trigger on the tragic days of January 7, 8 and 9, 2015, were then killed by security forces, but 14 people face several charges accused of providing logistical support to the terrorists, three of them declared fugitives from Justice.
The main crime with which the defendants are linked is the ‘terrorist association for the preparation of one or more crimes’, with several of them accused of delivering weapons to the perpetrators.
Regarding the fugitives, they are Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine, and Hayat Boumeddiene, wife of Amedy Coulibaly, one of those responsible.
On January 7, 2015, the brothers Chérif and Said Kouachi broke into the weekly Charlie Hebdo and opened fire indiscriminately on those present in the newsroom, where 11 people lost their lives, including the cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Tignous, Georges Wolinski and Honoré.
Self-proclaimed members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula assassinated a policeman after leaving the scene of the massacre and after a two-day hunt were killed by officers.
For his part, Coulibaly shot on January 8 the municipal police Clarissa Jean-Philippe in Montrouge, in the department of Hautes-de-Seine, and on the 9th he killed four human beings in the Parisian Jewish Hyper Cacher market, before taking 26 hostages and being killed by the authorities.
Around 200 people, including witnesses and experts, are summoned to the trial based in a special court in the capital, a process that the Covid-19 pandemic delayed its start.
As stated to France Inter station, Marie Dosé, lawyer of one of the accused, it should be taken into account that there are defendants who “did not know anything about the precise criminal plans of the authors of the attacks” and understand that those responsible are dead.
The day before, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo republished, at the beginning of the trial, the cartoons about the prophet Muhammad, which would have served as a pretext for the massacre five years ago, unleashing the wrath of sectors of the Muslim world in 2006 .
‘They will not bring us to our knees, nor will we ever give up,’ said the director of the medium, Riss, to justify the controversial decision, which the publication described as ‘indispensable’, while for others it continues to represent a lack of respect under the protection of freedom expression.
The trial for the January 2015 attacks is just the second in France for an attack by Islamic extremists, after the 2017 trial for the 2012 crimes committed by Mohammed Merah in Toulouse and Montauban.
