A Paris court begins to examine the appeal of two of the fourteen people found guilty in the first instance for complicity in the attacks
Seven years and eight months after the wave of jihadist attacks in Paris in January 2015, a Paris court began this Monday to examine the appeal of two of the fourteen convicts who challenged the first conviction. The decision will be known on October 21.
These attacks were the starting point of a wave of jihadist attacks in France. Three Islamic terrorists – the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly – murdered between January 7 and 9, 2015, 17 people in three attacks: the massacre in the offices of the satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’, the taking of hostages in the Jewish supermarket Hyper Cacher and the murder of a policewoman in Montrouge, on the outskirts of Paris.
The three terrorists could not be tried. They were killed by the police after the attack. But 14 of his accomplices were prosecuted and sentenced in December 2020 to sentences ranging from four years in prison to life in prison for their role in preparing the attacks.
After their appeal, two of the defendants sit back in the dock: Ali Riza Polat and Amar Ramdani, friends of Amedy Colibaly, the Montrouge terrorist and Hyper Chacher. Polat was sentenced in the first instance to 30 years in prison for “complicity of murder” and Ramdadi to 20 years in prison for “association of malefactors for terrorist purposes”. Both continue to proclaim their innocence.
The attack with kalashnikovs against ‘Charlie Hebdo’ was a revenge of the Kouachi brothers because the weekly had published in 2006 the controversial cartoons of Muhammad. After the attack, the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’ (I am Charlie) traveled the world in solidarity with the victims of the massacre and in defense of freedom of expression.
Richard Malka, a lawyer for ‘Charlie Hebdo’, explained in statements to France Info that in this second trial his duty is to “try to go further in analyzing the causes of the attacks and how to combat them. The answer must obviously be judicial, but that is not how we will win this fight, which is, first of all, a fight of ideas.
Malka considered that this battle of ideas is “unfortunately still a topical issue”, as seen in the case of the British writer Salman Rushdie, author of the controversial book ‘Satanic Verses’. Rushdie, against whom Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989, was stabbed last August while giving a lecture in the United States.
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