PARIS: Fourteen suspected accomplices of the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket appeared in a Paris court on Wednesday, five years after the three days of terror that rocked France.

The killings, which began on Jan 7, 2015, sparked a series of attacks on French soil, including “lone wolf” attacks by people said to be inspired by the militant Islamic State group that have since claimed more than 250 lives.

Hearings began under heavy security as eleven of the suspects faced the court on charges of conspiracy in a terrorist act or association with a terror group.

Three others, including the wife of one of the gunmen, are being tried in absentia because they fled to IS-held territory in Syria days before the attacks.

Survivors and family members of victims attended the trial’s opening, seated opposite the bench of the accused, visibly emotional and wearing face masks because of Covid-19 restrictions.Some 150 experts and witnesses will be heard over the next two and a half months in the trial that will revisit one of the most painful chapters in France’s modern history.

The three assailants were killed by police, but suggestions that those on trial were only minor players have been rubbished by prosecutors and relatives of the victims.

“These people aren’t lackeys,” said Patrick Klugman, a lawyer for one of the victims, insisting that the suspects shared a deep-seated anti-Semitism.

Twelve people, including some of France’s most celebrated cartoonists, were gunned down on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the paper’s offices in eastern Paris.

A day later, Amedy Coulibaly, who became close to Cherif Kouachi while they were in prison, killed a 27-year-old police officer, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, during a traffic check in Montrouge, outside Paris.

“I just want to know why my daughter was killed. It’s just so unfair,” Clarissa’s mother Marie-Louisa Jean-Philippe, who will testify at the trial, told French daily Liberation on Wednesday.

Coulibaly went on to kill four men, all Jews, during a hostage-taking at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris on Jan 9. He recorded a video saying the three attacks were coordinated and carried out in the name of the militant Islamic State jihadist group.

Coulibaly was killed when police stormed the supermarket. The Kouachi brothers were killed when officers carried out a nearly simultaneous operation at the printing shop where they were holed up northeast of Paris.

But shortly after the trial opened, a lawyer for one of the defendants blamed French intelligence services, saying the bloodbath “could have been avoided if the intelligence and surveillance services had done their jobs properly”.

Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2020