Trial of suspected Charlie Hebdo attack accomplices begins

Reuters, Paris :
Fourteen alleged accomplices to the Islamist gunmen who attacked the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 went on trial on Wednesday, as the country recalled a dark episode that marked the onset of a wave of militant violence.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex wrote in a tweet the simple words: “Always Charlie”.
On January 7, 2015, Said and Cherif Kouachi, armed with automatic weapons, went on the rampage in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, whose satire on race, religion and politics tested the limits of what society would accept in the name of free speech.
They killed 12 people in an attack claimed by al Qaeda.
The next day, Amedy Coulibaly, an acquaintance of Cherif Kouachi, shot dead a female police officer. On January 9, he killed four Jewish men at a kosher supermarket. In a video, he said he acted in the name of Islamic State.
The three were killed by police in different stand-offs.
Eleven of the 14 defendants appeared in courtroom modified especially for the trial, each watched over by two police officers wearing balaclavas and bullet-proof vests. They told the presiding judge they would answer the court’s questions.
Three are being tried in absentia. Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly’s partner at the time of the attacks, and brothers Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine, traveled to areas of Syria under Islamic State’s control days before the attacks and may be dead.