This Thursday evening, Ali Riza Polat was sentenced on appeal to life imprisonment for complicity in the murders perpetrated by the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly in January 2015. The latter had killed 17 people at the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, in Montrouge and at the Hyper Cacher. The special assize court of Paris has combined this sentence with a security period of twenty years.
The prosecution had requested this maximum sentence on Tuesday – including 22 years of security – against Ali Riza Polat, asking the court to “protect” society from this man with “extreme dangerousness”, still “anchored in radical Islamism”. When the verdict was announced, Ali Riza Polat, a broad build in a white sweatshirt, got up and pretended to leave the box, before sitting down again.
Thirteen years in prison for the other accused
In his last words to the court before she retired to deliberate, the 37-year-old Franco-Turk had proclaimed his innocence one last time, repeating that he was “not a terrorist”. Presenting himself willingly as a thug who “loves money”, this close friend of Amedy Coulibaly has just admitted having recovered a bag of “rotten” weapons in the summer of 2014, assuring that they were not intended for the attacks but to a “robbery”.
“If I had provided the weapons, I would have assumed,” he said. At first instance, in December 2020, the court had not followed the prosecution’s requisitions and pronounced a sentence of thirty years’ imprisonment against him. The second defendant, Amar Ramdani, 41, was sentenced to thirteen years in prison, including two thirds of security, for having provided weapons to Amedy Coulibaly. He had received the maximum sentence, 20 years in prison, two years ago.