JUSTICE SERVED

Fourteen Defendants Found Guilty After Much-Awaited Charlie Hebdo Trial

Eleven of the defendants were tried in person but three who allegedly went on the run were tried in absentia.

Fourteen people involved in the 2015 terrorist attack on the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo were found guilty on Wednesday. The accomplices were convicted on terrorism-related charges in some instances and lesser charges in other cases, but all were found to have taken some part in the attack or a subsequent attack on a Jewish supermarket which killed 17 people in total. The main attackers were killed by police.

Three of the Hebdo attackers’ associates were tried in absentia, including Amedy Coulibaly’s ex-girlfriend Hayat Boumeddiene who is still at large. There have been reports that the other two are dead. More than a hundred witnesses testified as part of the trial, which was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic and the health of one of the defendants. Laurent Sourisseau, Charlie Hebdo’s publication director, recounted the shooting during his testimony. “Often one asks oneself how one will die. Me, I was going to die here, on the ground at Charlie Hebdo, at my newspaper,” he said. The cartoon of Prophet Muhammad published in Charlie Hebdo inspired more violence this year when a teacher was beheaded for showing it in his classroom.