France’s most wanted female gets 30 years at Hebdo trial
France’s most wanted woman, Hayat Boumeddiene, was sentenced in absentia yesterday to 30 years in prison, at the end of a trial of 14 accomplices in the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in Paris.
The Charlie Hebdo trial, which lasted three months, was the first since a wave of terror attacks that have hit France in the past five years and the first for the country’s newly created national anti-terror prosecutor. It related to three days of horror in January 2015, during which 17 people were killed.
Some of France’s most famous cartoonists were murdered at the satirical magazine, which had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
That attack was followed by the killing of a French policewoman and the taking of hostages at the Hyper Cacher market, after which four Jewish men were murdered.
All three assailants were killed in shootouts with the police in the wake of the attacks, leaving only their accomplices to face trial.
All 14 were found guilty of assisting brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and Amedy Coulibaly, the supermarket hostage-taker.
The Kouachi brothers claimed they were acting on behalf of al Qaeda, while Coulibaly had sworn loyalty to Islamic State.
Boumeddiene was Coulibaly’s common-law wife and photos of the pair released shortly after the attacks show her wearing a niqab and aiming a crossbow at the camera. She was cited in an interview to an Islamic State propaganda outlet in late 2015 as saying: ‘‘May France be cursed by Allah.’’
She vanished in the days leading up to the attacks, but one witness – the French widow of an Islamic State emir – testified from jail that she had run across Boumeddiene late last year at a camp in Syria.
After three months of proceedings, frequently held up by the Covid -pandemic, she was found guilty of financing terrorism and belonging to a criminal terrorist network and sentenced to 30 years in prison, with two-thirds of the sentence ‘‘incompressible’’.
The court heard that Boumeddiene had taken out consumer loans and vehicle rentals to aid Coulibaly just before the attacks, and that she ‘‘could not ignore that the money withdrawn from her bank account was going to be used to finance the terrorist attacks of her husband and the Kouachi brothers’’.
The judge also handed a 30-year sentence to Ali Riza Polat, a 35-year-old FrenchTurkish friend of Coulibaly, whom prosecutors presented as his ‘‘right-hand man’’.
Mohamed Belhoucine, presumed dead but the subject of an international arrest warrant, was sentenced to life in jail for acting as Coulibaly’s mentor.
The others were given sentences of between four and 20 years on charges ranging from membership of a criminal network to complicity in the attacks.
In court to hear the verdict were Laurent ‘‘Riss’’ Sourisseau, the Charlie Hebdo editor, and Malian-born Lassana Bathily, who was hailed a hero and granted French nationality for saving customers at the Hyper Cacher store.
Meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron’s government has introduced legislation to tackle radical Islamism in France, a bill that has caused angry protests in some Muslim countries.