7 January 2015
PARIS – Assault on Charlie Hebdo
On January 7, 2015 Said and Cherif Kouachi, two Franco-Algerian jihadist brothers aged 32 and 34, who returned to France from Syria, masked and armed with Kalašnikovs raid the headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, a few hundred meters from the Bastille and open fire.
They look for journalists one by one and get their names told before shooting.
They fall under the blows of the terrorist commando Charb, the director, and the very popular satirical designers Wolinski, Cabu, Tignous and Honoré. Also killed are the editorial curator Ourrad, the journalist Cayat, the economist Bernard Maris, who had a column on Charlie Hebdo under the pseudonym of Oncle Bernard, Michel Renaud, a concierge attendant, a policeman who rushed by bicycle from the nearby police station and another who was on guard within the editorial office. The killers leave twelve victims on the ground and flee in a car they have to abandon after a collision with a vehicle driven by a woman. They threaten another motorist and walk away with his car. And right in the car the officers found their ID cards. In the northern banlieue of Paris, an unprecedented manhunt is unleashed.
Surveled by police, they are killed on Jan. 9 during a firefight in a printing press outside Paris; on the same day their accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly, 32, of Malian descent, after killing a policewoce on January 8, murders four other hostages inside a supermarket where he barricaded himself. The latter, too, then, loses his life during the raid of the French special forces.
This is the most ferocious attack in France since that of 1961, at the time of the Algerian War. The final toll is seventeen deaths, in addition to the bombers, and a dozen wounded.
On 11 January 2015, a procession of more than two million people, more than three and a half million throughout France, expressed solidarity with the victims of the attacks and their families, was launched on the streets of Paris. According to the French authorities, this is the largest event in the history of the country, at least since these records have been kept. The procession participates, but isolated from the rest of the procession, the premieres of the nations
Europeans and other political leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Abu Mazen. No representative of the Moroccan government participates in the demonstration as, during this moment of commemoration, some protesters show images deemed to be disrespectful of Islamic morality. The United States participated with the ambassador in Paris and Russia with the foreign minister. Il
From all over Europe, quite rightly, there has been a chorus of condemnation and solidarity to the cry ‘I am Charlie’, which exalts the courage of the satirical newspaper and elevates it to the banner of democratic freedoms. Conversely, there was no shortage of those who, albeit without justifying the violence, criticized his modes of expression by stating the need to respect the beliefs of others. “I am not Charlie” is the slogan of the second. By both and the other, the attack was interpreted as an attack on Western freedom of expression, a warning to respect the Muslim religion and the figure of the Prophet.
On September 2, 2020, one of the most anticipated trials in French history began, relating both to the terrorist attack on January 7, 2015 in Paris to the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and to the other two events that occurred in that period: the shooting in the south of Paris that cost the life of a policewoman and the attack on the kosher supermarket in which there were 4 victims. The prosecution’s argument is that the three facts are linked to each other and that the defendants – 14 people in total – were actively involved in the organization of each of them. The material performers – brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi (Charlie Hebdo) and Amedy Coulibaly (author of the shooting in south Paris and the events of the kosher supermarket) – were killed by French police during the arrest. But there are still three wanted, including Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s ex-girlfriend.
For the occasion Charlie Hebdo has republished, in a special issue, the contested cartoons on Islam that provoked the violent reaction of fundamentalist Muslims (according to religious precepts, the depiction of Mahmom is blasphemous, all the more so if accompanied by obscene acts as in the drawings of the periodical). The editorial director, Laurent Sourisseau, who was injured in the attack, accompanied the publication with an editorial that reads: “We will never give up. The hatred that struck us is still there and, since 2015, he has had time to change, change appearance, go unnoticed and silently continue his ruthless crusade.” On the cover, moreover, stands the title “Tout ça pour ça” (“All this because of these”).
The 14 people who sit in the dock are accused of being accomplices of the brothers Kouachi and Coulibaly (the three were also childhood friends) and of having provided logistical and material support, providing the necessary weapons, for the organization of the attacks. The thesis pursued – but still to be proven – is that the people involved were part of a single group coordinated by the Kouachi and Coulibaly, although the former professed to belong to al Qaeda and the second to ISIS.
In December 2020, the special court for the January 2015 terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher ruled out the accusation of terrorism for 6 of the 11 defendants present in the courtroom. The six were found guilty of association for committing a crime but without the qualification of terrorist. Ali Riza Polat has been found “gulpty of complicity” with the killers, brothers Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly. Sentenced to 30 years in prison the companion of the Hyper Cacher killer, Coulibaly, Hayat Boumeddiene, fleeing from the days of the massacres and judged in absentia. The conviction reflects the demands of the prosecution, who had stressed the ‘important role’ of the woman in the preparation of the attacks, before fleeing to Syria before they were carried out. Nezar Michael Pastor, Amar Ramdani and Willy Prevost have been found guilty of associating with terrorist criminals. Said Makhlouf, Mohamed Fares, Abdelaziz Abbad, Metin Karasular, Miguel Martinez, Christophe Raumel are guilty of criminal association without the qualification of terrorist. The trial, which opened three months ago, was a tough test, not just for the civilian parties, survivors and family members of the victims, who relived the horror of those days. There was an interruption of more than a month, due to the contagion of one of the defendants, Polat, who fell ill with coronavirus. And during the debatment there were two terrorist attacks: in September two people were stabbed to death near Charlie Hebdo’s former headquarters and in October the teacher Samuel Paty who had shown Mamot cartoons in the classroom was beheaded.
In September 2022, the appeal process opens in Paris for two alleged supporters of the perpetrators of the jihadist attacks, close to Amedy Coulibaly.
The Special Court of Assizes must assess the degree of responsibility of each in the preparation of the attacks. Ali Riza Polat, a 37-year-old Franco-Turkish who faces the heaviest charges and life imprisonment, marked the first “historic” hearing with his outbursts and invectives. The judges had sentenced him to thirty years in prison for complicity in the crimes committed by Kouachi and Coulibaly. The second defendant, Amar Ramadani, received a 20-year sentence for terrorist criminal association. The two men forcefully denied any connection to the attacks.
On October 21, 2022, Ali Riza Polat sees his 30-year sentence of life imprisonment transformed, with a minimum prison sentence of 20 years before he can possibly benefit from parole. On the contrary, Amar Ramadani saw his sentence reduced from 20 to 13 years in prison.