One of the suspects currently on trial in connection to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January of 2015 is said to have threatened a female police officer in court.
Ali Riza Polat made threats to the female officer who had come to give testimony about the events of the terrorist attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the following attack on a Jewish supermarket by Amédy Coulibaly.
Described as the right-hand man of Coulibaly, Mr Polat yelled “You’re going to pay for it!” at the female investigator, which sparked outrage from the lawyers present in the court, Le Figaro reports.
“It’s outrageous, there are limits that can’t be crossed,” General Counsel Jean-Michel Bourlès said, adding that he would be pursuing charges against Polat over the outburst.
According to the police officer, Polat shared the same radical Islamist beliefs as Coulibaly and spoke of a wiretapped phone call between Polat’s mother and one of his friends in which she said Polat had labelled her a “disbeliever.”
Polat, who has been charged with “complicity to terrorism”, faces a potential life prison sentence if he is found guilty.
A total of 14 people were put on trial in September in connection with the 2015 terrorist attacks that saw 17 people killed.
Prior to the trial, Charlie Hebdo once again published the Mohammed cartoons that the terrorists claim inspired the attack.
“There was a need for a good reason to do it, a reason which has meaning and which brings something to the debate… to [reprint the pictures] this week at the opening of the trial of the January 2015 attacks, seemed essential to us,” the magazine’s editor Laurent Sourisseau, known as “Riss,” said.
After the publication, another radicalised Muslim man, Pakistani migrant Ali Hassan, also known as Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud, stabbed two people outside the magazine’s former office. The Pakistani national is believed to have carried out the attacks in response to the publishing of the cartoons.