[ad_1]
A French court convicted 14 associates of French Islamist extremists accused of carrying out the January 2015 attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
Among the 14 is Hayat Boumediene, the former partner of Amedi Koulibali who killed a policewoman and four other people in the supermarket. Boumediene was one of the three defendants tried in absentia. He was found guilty of financing terrorism and participating in a criminal terrorist network. Hayat Boumediene, against whom an international arrest warrant was issued, is believed to be alive and in hiding somewhere in Syria, where she took refuge and joined the Islamic State.
Boumediene, whom prosecutors call the “Princess of the Islamic State”, was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Coulibaly himself collaborated with the gunmen who launched the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris in January 2015.
The 14 defendants were found guilty of a variety of charges, from participation in a criminal network to conspiracy to commit attacks. For all six, however, the court dropped the terrorism charge but found them guilty of other less serious crimes.
The terrorism charge remained in the hands of the main defendant, Ali Riza Polat, who was found guilty of complicity in the crimes committed by Koulibali and the brothers Saeed and Sherif Quasi. The prosecutor asked for life imprisonment, but the court eventually sentenced him to 30 years in prison. His attorney immediately announced that he would appeal the decision.
The other defendants, who according to the Prosecutor’s Office delivered weapons and other material to the perpetrators, knowing what they wanted them for, were sentenced to 4 to 20 years in prison. Mohamed Belousin, who was tried in absentia and is believed to have been killed in Syria, was sentenced to life in prison. Bellussin was the man who helped Boumediene escape.
The trial revived one of the darkest episodes in modern French history, marking the beginning of a wave of Islamist violence in the country that has claimed the lives of dozens of people in the coming months.
Present in court today were relatives of several victims of the attacks, survivors of the magazine’s massacre, Reese, editor-in-chief of Charli Hebdo, and Lassana Batili, a young Muslim immigrant from Mali who hid some customers from the Jewish supermarket and saved them from death.
In his main article in today’s Charlie Hebdo, Rees commented that after the court ruling was announced, “the cycle of violence (…) will finally be closed, at least in its criminal part, since, on a human level, the consequences will never go away. ” .
The Said brothers and Sheriff Kwasi broke into Charlie Hebdo’s office on January 7, 2015, and opened fire, killing 12 people, nearly a decade after the magazine published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
The third perpetrator, Amedi Koulibali, killed a policewoman and four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris. Like the Quasi, Koulibali was later killed in a shootout with the police.
Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ
