A French police officer walks in front of the Palais de Justice where the appeals process is taking place. (icon picture)
Image: AFP
Of the nine men convicted at first instance, two appealed. The two accused are now serving long prison sentences. The attacks in January 2015 killed 17 people.
Gut seven years after the Islamist attacks on the editorial office of the satirical newspaper “Charlie Hebdo” and a kosher supermarket near Paris, the verdicts in the appeal process against two people who were jointly responsible have fallen: The 37-year-old Ali Riza Polat was sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday, the second Defendant Amar Ramdani to 13 years in prison. The two men had denied the allegations against them.
The attacks in January 2015 killed 17 people, including France’s best-known cartoonists, four French Jews and a policewoman. The three perpetrators were shot dead by the police.
Polat was found guilty of helping to prepare the supermarket bombing. He hails from the same Paris suburb as the perpetrator, Amedy Coulibaly. According to the court, the 41-year-old Ramdani had procured weapons for Coulibaly, whom he had met in prison, and helped finance the attack.
There were around 300 joint plaintiffs at the trial. Of the nine men convicted at first instance, only Polat and Ramdani appealed. The two had been sentenced to 30 and 20 years in prison in the first instance.
