Fourteen people will go on trial in Paris next May over the January 2015 attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and other targets that heralded a wave of terror strikes on France, judicial sources said Wednesday (October 23rd).
The trial will take place from May 4th to July 10th, lawyers and a judicial source told AFP.
Seventeen people were killed over three days in and around Paris in the January 2015 attacks.
Cherif Kouachi and his brother Said killed 12 people on January 7th at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, including some of France's best known cartoonists.
Over the following two days, a third gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, shot dead a young policewoman and killed four people at a Jewish supermarket.
All three gunmen, who had claimed allegiance to extremist groups, were killed by police.
The 14 accused are suspected of having provided logistical aid to the attackers.
The case will be heard by a special court seated, for logistical reasons, in a new, bigger building in the extreme north-west of Paris and not the Palace of Justice in the centre that would ordinarily have hosted it, the sources said.
Eleven of the suspects are in detention, but three are set to be tried in absentia.
They include Hayat Boumedienne, the partner of Coulibaly, who Turkish authorities said at the time had crossed into Syria as her partner shot the policewoman.
Also on the run are brothers Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine who also left for the Iraq-Syria region just before the attacks.
Unconfirmed reports have said all three could now be dead after fierce bombing campaigns in the area to defeat the extremists there.
Responsibility for the attack against Charlie Hebdo was claimed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
