Paris | The Paris Special Assize Court on Wednesday pronounced sentences ranging from 4 years in prison to life imprisonment in the trial of the attacks that killed 17 people in the Paris region in January 2015.
She sentenced to 30 years of criminal imprisonment the main accused, Ali Riza Polat, for “complicity” in the “terrorist” crimes committed by the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi and Amédy Coulibaly during the attacks against the weekly Charlie Hebdo and a Hyper store. Hide.
He thus escapes the life imprisonment demanded by the Advocate General. His lawyer immediately announced that he would appeal his conviction.
The fleeing companion of Amédy Coulibaly, Hayat Boumeddiene, judged by default for her role in the preparation of the attacks, was sentenced to the same sentence.
Mohamed Belhoucine, presumed dead in Syria and who was tried by default, was sentenced to the heaviest sentence, life imprisonment.
The court also ruled out the terrorist qualification for six of the eleven defendants present, simply retaining “the association of criminals”.
It took three months of intense and chaotic hearings in this extraordinary trial to obtain this verdict.
Many civil parties lined the benches of the courtroom for the reading of this historic verdict. Among them, relatives of the victims of the attacks, the ex-hostage of Hyper Cacher Lassana Bathily, survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and in particular its editorial director Riss.
In an editorial published on Wednesday, the head of the satirical newspaper estimated that once the court’s decision has been rendered, “the cycle of violence (…) will have finally closed, at least on the criminal front because, humanly, the repercussions will never fade ”.
Between January 7 and 9, 2015, three days of terror shook France and left 17 dead: 11 in the attack against Charlie Hebdo, four in that against the Hyper Cacher supermarket and two police officers on the sidelines of these attacks.