On January 7, 2015, France faced jihadist attacks

Two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, hooded and dressed in black, opened fire on January 7, 2015 at the headquarters of “Charlie Hebdo” in Paris, shouting “Allah akbar”. Twelve people, including five designers – Cabu, Wolinski, Charb, Tignous, Honoré – and the economist Bernard Maris, were killed. The brothers, who claimed to be from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqpa), managed to escape. They will be killed by the police in a printing house in the Paris suburbs, after two days on the run.

Around 8 a.m. on January 8, a municipal police officer, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, was shot dead in the street in Montrouge, near Paris. Amedy Coulibaly, who we will discover is close to Chérif Kouachi, hits him in the carotid artery before fleeing.

On January 9, this same Amedy Coulibaly, claiming to be a member of the Islamic State (IS), entered, gun in hand, the Jewish store Hyper Cacher at Porte de Vincennes, east of Paris. He took customers hostage, killing four people and seriously injuring seven others, before being himself shot dead during an assault by the police. On December 16, 2020, thirteen people (including eleven present at the trial) were sentenced to sentences ranging from four years of imprisonment to life for their role in the attacks in Paris against the newspaper “Charlie Hebdo” and the Hyper Cacher convenience store. .

On February 3, Moussa Coulibaly stabbed three soldiers standing guard in front of a Jewish community center in Nice, a coastal city in the southeast, injuring two. As soon as he was arrested, he will be sentenced in 2019 to 30 years of criminal imprisonment, including 20 years of probation, for attempted assassinations, but also for terrorist criminal association for having sought to go to Syria and join the IS group.

On April 19, an Algerian student, Sid-Ahmed Ghlam, killed Aurélie Châtelain, a 32-year-old mother, in a parking lot in Villejuif, a southeastern suburb of Paris. The 29-year-old man, who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, was sentenced on appeal in 2021 to life imprisonment for terrorist assassination and for a planned attack against a church.

On June 26, Yassin Salhi, 35, killed and beheaded his boss Hervé Cornara in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier (south-east). He hangs his head, surrounded by Islamic flags, on the fence of an industrial gas site. He then drove his van into gas cylinders, causing an explosion, before being overpowered by firefighters to whom he shouted: “Allah akbar”. He hanged himself a few months later in prison.

On August 21, Ayoub El Khazzani boarded the Thalys Amsterdam-Paris in Brussels armed with a Kalashnikov, a semi-automatic pistol, a cutter and a bottle filled with flammable liquid. The 25-year-old Moroccan, commissioned by the Islamic State group, seriously injured a passenger before being overpowered by other passengers, including two American soldiers in civilian clothes on vacation in Europe. He is sentenced on appeal, in 2022 in Paris, to life imprisonment for “terrorist assassination attempts”.

Around 9:20 p.m. on November 13, three suicide bombers blew themselves up around the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of the capital, where a France-Germany football match was taking place. A bus driver is killed. Shortly after, the “terrace commando” machine-gunned bars and restaurants in the heart of Paris. At 9:40 p.m., a final commando arrives at the Bataclan, a Parisian performance hall. The first victims fell on the sidewalk, then the killers fired into the concert hall for nearly three hours, until the elite forces attacked. The attacks, claimed by ISIS, left 130 dead (including 90 at the Bataclan) and more than 350 injured. Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the jihadist commandos, was sentenced in June 2022 in France to irreducible life imprisonment for his participation in these attacks.