Magazine attackers' accomplices found guilty
In this file photo, People gather to attend a ceremony in front of the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris, France, January 9, 2016.
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 fall, 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 shootout 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.
The attacks, claimed by al-Qaida and Islamic State, laid bare France’s struggle to counter the threat of militants brought up in the country and of foreign jihadists.
Terrorism-related charges were dropped for six of the defendants who were found guilty of lesser crimes.
Charlie Hebdo journalists testified during the trial.
