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The Islamist gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish store, killing 17, are dead but on Wednesday, five years after the attack that marked the start of a wave of Islamist violence in France, their alleged accomplices face trial.
Fourteen defendants, three of whom will be tried in absentia and may be dead, face charges that include terrorist financing, membership of a terrorist organization and supplying arms to the perpetrators: Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly.
On January 7, 2015, the Kouachi brothers went on the rampage at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, whose satire on race, religion and politics tested the limits of what society would accept in the name of life. freedom of expression.
They killed 12 in an attack claimed by Al Qaeda.
The next day, Coulibaly, an acquaintance of Cherif Kouachi, killed a policewoman. On January 9, he killed four Jewish men in a kosher supermarket. In a video, he said that he acted on behalf of the Islamic State.
More than 250 people have been killed in France in Islamist violence since the attacks and countering the threat remains a government priority, says Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.
Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch placed the then-editor of Charlie Hebdo on its “wanted list” after weekly cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, including one of him wearing a bomb-shaped turban.
The magazine plans to republish the cartoons to coincide with the trial.
“We will never lie down. We will never give up,” wrote editor Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau.
President Emmanuel Macron said it was not his place to comment on the magazine’s editorial judgment and that freedom to blaspheme went hand in hand with freedom of belief in France.
“Satire is not hate speech,” the president told a news conference in Beirut.
Among the accused are Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly’s partner at the time of the attacks, and brothers Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine. All three traveled to areas of Syria under Islamic State control days before the attacks and may be dead.
The trial, which will last 10 weeks and will be filmed throughout, is likely to evoke painful memories.
Chloe Verlhac lost her husband, cartoonist Bernard Verlhac, known as “Tignous”, in the attack.
“He literally died with the marker in his hand,” he told RTL radio. “He never let it go.”
