[ad_1]
PARIS: A French court on Wednesday sentenced 14 people for crimes ranging from financing terrorism membership in a criminal gang in connection with the 2015 Islamist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket.
The trial has reopened one of modern France’s darkest episodes, just as another wave of Islamist attacks on his homeland this fall, including the beheading of a school teacher, prompted the government to crack down on what it calls separatism. Islamist.
Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices, shooting and killing 12, on January 7, 2015, nearly a decade after weekly mocking cartoons. the prophet Muhammad. A third attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a policewoman and then four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb. As the Kouachis, Coulibaly was killed in a shootout with the police. Among the 14 accomplices convicted on Wednesday was Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s ex-partner and one of the three defendants tried in absentia. She was believed to be still alive and on the run from an international arrest warrant, but prosecutors referred to her as an “Islamic State princess.” The judges convicted Boumeddiene, 32, of financing terrorism and belonging to a terrorist network, and sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
The attacks were claimed by Al Qaeda and Islamic State.
“The fact of choosing the victims precisely because they are journalists, or a member of the security forces, or of Jewish faith, clearly demonstrates in itself their desire to spread terror in Western countries,” said the presiding judge.
In Charlie Hebdo’s first reaction, the magazine’s lawyer described the defendants as part of a nebulous support network that allowed the attackers to shed blood. REUTERS
