With the main perpetrators dead, the court will focus on those accused of aiding the assaults on the Charlie Hebdo offices and a kosher supermarket that killed 17.
France began revisiting one of the worst chapters in its modern history on Wednesday, as a landmark trial opened in Paris for the January 2015 terrorist attacks that killed 17 people in and around the French capital. Over at least the next two months, before the glare of the world’s media and under tight security, the court is expected to meticulously examine three harrowing days that traumatized France five and a half years ago, starting with a daytime assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that Islamic extremists targeted after it published cartoons lampooning Islam. The killings were followed by a string of deadly jihadist attacks, culminating with assaults in November that year in and around Paris that killed 130 people, vaulting France into a yearslong state of emergency. Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the two brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack, died in a shootout with the police north of Paris two days later. A third attacker, Amédy Coulibaly, killed a police officer in a Parisian suburb and four Jewish hostages at a kosher supermarket before dying himself when the police stormed the building. With all the central assailants dead, the current trial will be more cathartic than revelatory for a country forced by the events to reckon with the threat of homegrown terrorism, permanently altering its balance between security and civil liberty. Those on trial, who range in age from 29 to 68, are charged with providing logistical aid to the assailants, by carrying or supplying cash, weapons and vehicles. Most of the accused are facing up to 20 years in prison. The court is expected to hear testimony from some 150 witnesses, and, exceptionally, the proceedings will be filmed for posterity. “For them, for us, for history,” the daily Libération wrote on a black front page on Wednesday. “From a collective point of view, you need a trial to say that this sequence of events is closed and is now in the past,” said Gérôme Truc, a sociologist who has worked extensively on the way countries like France have reacted to and commemorated terrorist attacks. “Society can move on.” But as the trial closes one chapter, it will open another: In the years to come, several major terrorism cases are expected to come to trial, especially over the November 2015 attacks in Paris and one in Nice in July 2016, with a record number of defendants and plaintiffs — and often without the perpetrators. “In a sense, it will be a sort of a big rehearsal,” Antoine Mégie, an expert on counterterrorism legislation, said of trial that began on Wednesday.
