Fourteen including attacker's partner Hayat Boumeddiene found guilty at Charlie Hebdo trials

Accomplices await sentencing for helping the Kouachi brothers carry out 2015 attack

Hayat Boumeddiene, right, seen presenting her passport at Sabiha Gokcen airport in Istanbul on January 2, 2015. AFP

Fourteen accomplices of the extremists behind the January 2015 attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket in Paris were found guilty.

Among the 14 was Hayat Boumeddiene, former partner of Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a policewoman and then four people in a Jewish supermarket.

One of three suspects to be tried in her absence, Boumeddiene was found guilty of financing terrorism and belonging to a criminal terrorist network. She is thought to be alive and on the run from an international arrest warrant in Syria, where she joined ISIS.

She was sentenced to 30 years in jail.

Coulibaly was an associate of the gunmen behind the deadly attack at the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.

The accomplices were found guilty on charges ranging from membership of a criminal network to complicity in the attacks. Terrorism-related charges were dropped for several of the defendants who were found guilty of lesser crimes.

"The fact of choosing victims precisely because they were journalists, or a member of the security forces, or of Jewish faith, clearly demonstrates in itself their desire to sow terror in Western countries," the presiding judge told the court.

The trial reopened one of modern France's darkest episodes, with the attacks marking the onset of a wave of violence that has killed scores more since.

Seventeen people were killed over three days of attacks in January 2015, beginning with the massacre of 12 people at the office of the magazine, which had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The killings , which signalled the start of a wave of attacks around Europe by extremists, triggered a global outpouring of solidarity with France under the 'I am Charlie' slogan.

“I was not killed, but what happened to me was absolutely chilling and I will live with it until my life is over,” cartoonist Corinne Rey testified.

The court head Coulibaly told his Jewish victims: "You are Jews and French, the two things I hate the most."

All three assailants were killed in shoot-outs with the police after the attacks, leaving only accomplices to face trial.

A police officer guards the courtroom at the Paris Hall of Justice on Wednesday. AP

Investigators sifted through 37 million items of phone data, according to video testimony.

Those on trial were accused of assisting brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who carried out the killings, and their accomplice, the supermarket hostage-taker Amedy Coulibaly.

Lasting more than three months, the trial was repeatedly held up because of the Covid-19 pandemic but has again highlighted the horror of the attacks, during a period when France has again faced killings blamed on radicals.