Charlie Hebdo: Key accused in 2015 Paris terror attacks trial jailed for 30 years

A French court on Wednesday jailed for 30 years the main accused present for the trial over the 2015 killings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices and a Jewish supermarket, stopping short of the life term demanded by the prosecution.

The trial has reopened one of modern France's darkest episodes, just as another wave of Islamist attacks on home soil this autumn, including the beheading of a schoolteacher, prompted the government to crack down on what it calls Islamist separatism.

Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed Charlie Hebdo's offices in Paris, spraying gunfire and killing 12, on January7, 2015, nearly a decade after the weekly published cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed.

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A third attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a police woman and then four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb. Like the Kouachis, Coulibaly was killed in a shootout with police.

Ali Riza Polat was convicted of complicity in terror crimes by the court, which also gave a 30-year jail sentence in absentia to Hayat Boumeddiene, the partner of one of the attackers. She fled to Syria in the wake of the killings.

All the attackers were killed in the wake of the killings. A total of 14 suspected accomplices went on trial, three of them in absentia.

A life jail sentence was given to another prime suspect, Mohamed Belhoucine, although he was tried in absentia and is presumed to be dead in Syria.

Other sentences ranged from four years, with all those present in court convicted for their role in providing support for the killings that shocked France.

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

That attack was followed by the murder of a French policewoman and the hostage-taking at the Hyper Cacher market in which four Jewish men were killed.

Prosecutors sought a life sentence for Polat, a 35-year-old French-Turkish friend of one of the attackers. He denied any knowledge of a terrorist plot.

On the eve of the trial's opening, Charlie Hebdo, which has long tested the limits of what society will accept in the name of free speech, re-printed the cartoons that had stirred outrage in the Muslim world when they were first published by a Danish paper in 2005.

A month later, history teacher Samuel Paty was decapitated by a teenage Islamist who said in a recorded message that he was avenging Paty's use of the cartoons in a class on civil liberties.