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The special criminal court of Paris sentenced fourteen people for their involvement in the Paris attacks of January 2015: that of the editorial staff of the French satirical weekly Charlie hebdo, in which 12 people were killed, a shooting in the south of Paris in which a policewoman was killed and an attack on a kosher supermarket that killed another 4 people. Eleven defendants were present in the courtroom for the verdict and three, fugitives, were tried in absentia. The sentences handed down by the Court range from four years in prison to life imprisonment: six defendants were accused of terrorism.
Ali Riza Polat, the main defendant present, was sentenced to thirty years in prison for “complicity” in the attacks perpetrated in January 2015 by the brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly against the weekly Charlie hebdo and in the kosher supermarket. Hayat Boumedienne, Amedy Coulibaly’s partner, was in turn sentenced to 30 years (after the attacks she escaped to Sira and was never located).
Today’s verdict was issued after fifty-four days of hearings and was received in silence by the numerous civilian actors present: among them, were the relatives of the people killed in the attacks, the former hostage of the supermarket attack Lassana Bathily , and the director of Charlie hebdo Laurent Sourisseau, also known as Riss. In an editorial published this Wednesday, Riss wrote that once the sentence is pronounced “the cycle of violence (…) will finally be closed, at least on the criminal level, because, humanly speaking, the repercussions will never be canceled.”
The sentences are lower than the requests made by the National Antiterrorist Prosecutor’s Office: it had requested life imprisonment for two defendants and from five to thirty years in prison for the other twelve.
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