Almost eight years after the ‘jihadist’ attacks against the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a supermarket in Paris, Ali Riza Polat was sentenced this Thursday, on appeal, to the maximum sentence, life imprisonment, for complicity in the crimes.
In the first instance, in December 2020, Polat, who had always denied being a “terrorist”, had been sentenced to thirty years in prison.
The special decision of the Paris appeal court aggravated the sentence, following the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, which asked him to “protect” society from a man in “extreme danger” and “send a clear message” to those who would feel “tempted to help a terrorist.
The judges set a minimum period of 20 years to serve the sentence.
After six weeks of trial and more than nine hours of deliberation, Ali Riza Polat, a 37-year-old French-Turkish, stood up after the verdict and pretended to leave his seat, before sitting back down.
The last time he spoke in court, Ali Riza Polat pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.
“I never woke up one morning to destroy the lives of these people,” said the accused of complicity in the crimes committed by the brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly.
Polat was a close friend of Jewish supermarket killer Amedy Coulibaly and only admitted to recovering a bag of weapons in the summer of 2014, saying they were intended for a “robbery”.
“If I had provided the weapons, I would have taken over,” he said.
For the prosecution, this “right hand” and “ideal accomplice” of Amedy Coulibaly, with whom he grew up in Grigny (Essonne), was “at the center of the preparations for these monstrous deaths”.
He “provided decisive assistance to the terrorists,” who had acted in a remedial manner on January 7, 8 and 9, 2015, and “in full knowledge of the facts” of their plans, Attorney General Manon Brignol said.
“The nature of these weapons can only indicate a clear desire for violent action,” said the chairman of the panel of judges, Jean-Christophe Hullin, in his deliberation.
The court also sentenced another friend of Amedy Coulibaly, Amar Ramdani, 41, to 13 years in prison for supplying weapons to the Jewish supermarket killer.
The Public Ministry had requested confirmation of the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison for terrorist criminal association pronounced in the first instance.
He is “convicted of terrorism, which he always denied and continued to deny when the verdict was announced,” said one of his lawyers, Yves Leberquier, underlining the “extremely contradictory feelings” of his defense, which had requested acquittal.
During three days of terror, brothers Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly killed 17 people, including cartoonists Cabu and Wolinski, culminating in their own deaths in a police raid.
These actions marked the beginning of a series of terrorist attacks in France, with the one on November 13, 2015, whose trial ended in June, and the one on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, on July 14, 2016, currently on trial. . the same court.
Source: TSF
