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Police officers patrol exterior Paris’ courthouse in France. (AFP)
Paris:
A major suspect within the trial over the 2015 massacres at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere in Paris denied on Friday any accountability for the assaults carried out by terrorists, one in every of whom was an in depth affiliate.
Ali Riza Polat, a 35-year-old Franco-Turkish man, was jailed a couple of weeks after the fear assault that shocked France, with investigators saying he tried to flee the nation a number of occasions heading for Syria.
“I am innocent!” Polat informed the court docket, his head shaved and his face hidden behind a material masks.
“I’m here because certain people, lying squealers, said all sorts of nonsense… but they’re lying,” he mentioned.
Born in Istanbul, Polat moved to France when he was three and mentioned he fell into petty crime when he was 13 or 14, later beginning to deal medicine.
He grew up in the identical tough Paris suburb of Grigny as Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a police officer on January 8, 2015 and 4 individuals on the Hyper Cacher Jewish grocery store the subsequent day earlier than being killed by police.
Those assaults got here simply after two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, stormed the Charlie Hebdo workplaces, killing 12.
Suspected of serving to present the weapons for all three gunmen, Polat is going through essentially the most critical cost among the many 14 accused: complicity in a terrorist act, which carries a possible life sentence.
But Polat, who says he transformed to Islam in 2014, insisted he had no position within the assaults.
“I have nothing to do with them. You cannot kill the innocent… I am not violent,” he mentioned.
Sold-out Charlie Hebdo
For his defence, Polat has chosen Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the lawyer who defended the convicted worldwide terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, higher generally known as “Carlos the Jackal.” She later grew to become his companion and married him in a spiritual ceremony in jail, although the union has no authorized validity.
The trial of Polat and 13 different suspects accused of aiding the three gunmen opened Wednesday, and is about to run till November.
Charlie Hebdo marked the event by reprinting the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that had angered Muslims all over the world, a transfer that drew reward from free-speech advocates however anger from many Muslim leaders.
On Friday, the paper mentioned its Wednesday version offered out the primary day, prompting it to print 200,000 extra copies that may hit newsstands within the coming days.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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