A view at a painting by French street artist Christian Guemy in tribute to members of Charlie Hebdo newspaper who were killed on on January 07, 2015. Photo / Getty Images
Victims of the 2015 attack on the satirical weekly took the stand this week with vivid accounts of how their colleagues were killed — and how their own lives were suddenly overturned.
One by one, the witnesses told a hushed court how their lives were brutally upended on a cold January morning in 2015, when two brothers wielding assault rifles burst onto a quiet Parisian street looking for the newsroom of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly.
Jérémy Ganz, a colleague of Frédéric Boisseau — a maintenance worker shot dead as the gunmen searched for the newspaper's unmarked offices — recalled how his hands were covered with so much blood that he couldn't unlock his phone to call for help.
Corinne Rey, a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, spoke tearfully of sheer terror and "absolute distress" when the assailants, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, forced her at gunpoint to guide them to the office doors and punch in the entrance code, before walking in and starting to shoot.
Sigolène Vinson, a lawyer and contributor to the weekly, recounted how the gunmen left behind a cloud of gunpowder and the strong smell of blood. Around her, shards of bullet-torn bones were like "shining specks of glitter," she said, while the body of Stéphane Charbonnier, the editorial director, was face down like a "dislocated puppet."
And Simon Fieschi, Charlie Hebdo's webmaster, explained with clinical precision how his ribs and shoulder blade were shattered and how vertebrae in his spine were hit so badly that the attack left him almost 3 inches shorter, with severely impaired motor functions.
"I have no desire to offer up my pain to all of those who inflicted it upon me," he said. "At the same time, I don't want to hide the consequences of these acts."
Over five years after the January 2015 terrorist attacks, which killed 17 people in and around Paris, witnesses and survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre took centre stage at a courthouse in northern Paris this week, days into a landmark trial expected to last until November.
The testimonies offered a chilling reminder of the ruthlessness and military precision of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, which lasted only 1 minute and 49 seconds but killed 10 cartoonists, journalists and other staff members — alongside Boisseau and a police officer, Ahmed Merabet — and left indelible physical and psychological scars for its survivors.
The faces of those testifying were obscured by masks worn as a prevention measure against the coronavirus, focusing attention on their eyes — clouded by tears or lost in memories of the massacre.
"Living or dead, wounded or not, I think none of us escaped what happened," Fieschi said. His testimony ended in a heavy silence, punctuated only by the tap-tap of his crutch hitting the courtroom floor as he returned to his seat.
Those directly responsible for the attacks are long dead. The Kouachi brothers, who said they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad for cartoons of him published in Charlie Hebdo, died in a shootout with security forces two days later.
A third attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a police officer in a Parisian suburb and four Jewish hostages at a kosher supermarket before dying himself when police stormed the building.
The 14 people on trial, three of them in absentia, are accused of providing varying degrees of logistical aid to the attackers; none are suspected of being present at the scenes of the crimes.
But for the survivors, the testimony was about confronting their trauma, not the suspects.
"It's a bit cathartic," Patrick Pelloux, an emergency doctor who also freelanced for Charlie Hebdo, told the court. "Our wounds are still not healed."
"I've seen a lot, but scenes like that, never," said Pelloux, who had close friends at the satirical weekly and was one of the first to arrive on the scene.
"When you go into medical studies, it's to save people, and of all people, these were ones I would have wanted to save," Pelloux said, choking up. "And I was incapable of doing so."
Disturbing pictures of the crime scene and silent video surveillance footage of the attack were shown in court. But most time was spent listening to stories of lives brutally cut short and of lasting consequences for those who survived: interrupted careers and personal turmoil, hypervigilance and insomnia.
Some also expressed frustration that Charlie Hebdo's brand of biting satire had been increasingly challenged with accusations of racism and anti-Muslim bias.
"I want it to be said that us, we were innocent," said Laurent Sourisseau, a cartoonist who was wounded in the attack and is now the weekly's editorial director. People were insufficiently "combative" in defending freedom of expression, he said.
"If you don't live freely, what is the point of living?" Sourisseau asked.
Witnesses described the January 7 editorial meeting at Charlie Hebdo as a joyous affair, fueled by coffee and sweets, where they discussed the latest topics as 2015 got underway: a provocative new book, the growing number of young French jihadis leaving for Syria.
Then the gunmen burst in.
Survivors recalled how the assailants fired targeted, methodical bursts from their AK-47s.
Laurent Léger, formerly an investigative reporter for Charlie Hebdo, described a "kaleidoscope of images, sounds, memories, sensations" that overwhelmed him.
"In a flash, I saw the bodies fall," Léger said. "Listening to the others, plunging back into this nightmare, this carnage, it's very trying."
The testimonies of Rey and Vinson were particularly harrowing.
Rey's voice trembled when she recalled being grabbed by the brothers as she headed outside to smoke a cigarette. She remembered how prepared they were — they knew her face and her nickname, Coco — and their excitement as she typed in the entrance code.
"After the shooting, there was silence," said Rey. "A deathly silence."
For Vinson, who has a tattoo on her arm featuring the names of the 12 people killed, words tumbled out in long, vivid spurts, interrupted only when she stopped to steel herself.
She explained how she hid behind a low wall in the newsroom, heard shots and felt the impact of a body — Mustapha Ourrad, a proofreader — falling against it on the other side, and how Chérif Kouachi leaned toward her, telling her they didn't kill women. (In fact, one of the people they had just shot dead was Elsa Cayat, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who wrote a column for Charlie Hebdo.)
Peering at the gunman's eyes through his black mask, she remembered how soft his gaze seemed.
"I was surprised by how easy it was to give up" on life, Vinson said. She moved to southern France and for months was plagued by nightmares of Hayat Boumeddiene — Coulibaly's partner at the time of the attacks, who fled to Syria and is still thought to be alive — shooting her in the forehead with a crossbow.
But the courtroom also gave some the opportunity to air grievances. Some Charlie Hebdo survivors accused the media of failing to support the weekly and lamented growing timorousness in France over freedom of expression. On the eve of the trial, Charlie Hebdo defiantly reprinted cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad and Islam.
"We are living under siege, in Paris, in 2020," said Fabrice Nicolino, a journalist who was wounded in the legs, angrily accusing reporters at the court of caring little that the paper now works under draconian security. "What we are enduring, you aren't interested in it."
And those close to Boisseau, the maintenance worker who was killed, expressed frustration that the media had overwhelmingly focused on Charlie Hebdo.
Ganz, Boisseau's colleague, recalled hiding in a cramped restroom and holding his friend as he died, blood pooling on the floor.
"He was the good father who got up in the morning to go to work," said Ganz, calling Boisseau a symbol of ordinary French people who was "forgotten" in the attacks.
Catherine Gervasoni, Boisseau's partner, testified that she and the couple's two teenage sons talked about Boisseau "every day."
But "never about the 7th."
Written by: Aurelien Breeden
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dominique Pelicot had already confessed to the crimes.