Charlie Hebdo attack: 14 accomplices found guilty by French court
- Key defendant, ‘Islamic State princess’ Hayat Boumeddiene, was tried in absentia and sentenced to 30 years in jail
- Seventeen people were killed over three days in attacks that followed the satirical magazine’s publication of cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed in 2015
A French court on Wednesday convicted 14 people of crimes ranging from financing terrorism to membership of a criminal gang in relation to Islamist attacks in 2015 against the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket.
The trial has reopened one of modern France’s darkest episodes, just as another wave of Islamist attacks on home soil this autumn, including the beheading of a schoolteacher, prompted the government to crack down on what it calls Islamist separatism.
Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris, spraying gunfire and killing 12, on January 7, 2015, nearly a decade after the weekly published cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed.
A third attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a police woman and then four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb. Like the Kouachis, Coulibaly was killed in a shoot-out with police.
Among the 14 accomplices sentenced on Wednesday was Hayat Boumeddiene, the former partner of Coulibaly and one of three defendants tried in absentia. Believed to be still alive and on the run from an international arrest warrant, prosecutors referred to her as an “Islamic State princess”.
The judges convicted Boumeddiene, 32, of financing terrorism and belonging to a criminal terrorist network, and sentenced her to 30 years in jail.