The trial of 14 suspects linked to the terror attack on Charlie Hebdo has heard further dramatic evidence from survivors, including the man who now runs the satirical newspaper.
Laurent Sourisseau, known as Riss, was injured when brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi stormed the paper’s offices, killing 11 people in retaliation for its printing of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.
In less than two minutes, several of France’s most celebrated journalists and cartoonists were dead along with a maintenance worker and a security officer. As the Kouachi brothers fled they killed an injured police officer on the pavement outside.
Riss described how he and two other cartoonists Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier and Renald ‘Luz’ Luzier, were placed under police protection in 2012 after Charlie Hebdo ran the controversial cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper. A year later, he and Luz had their protection withdrawn.
“Charb had asked to be able to carry a weapon, but he was never allowed,” Riss said.
On the morning of 7 January 2015, Riss saw a man, dressed from head to toe in black, appear in the editorial conference room.
“I had the impression he was surprised there were so many people there. He had his weapon half lowered, he held the door with his right hand and he looked at everyone. Then I saw Franck Brinsolaro [Charb’s bodyguard] get his gun out. That was the first time I had seen him pull out his gun.”
The shooting started and Brinsolaro was killed.
“I heard a voice close by saying: ‘Not the women, not the women’, then the shooting continued,” Riss continued.
“I realised I was going to die. It was the end of my life. I waited my turn. Often one asks oneself how one will die. Me, I was going to die here, on the ground at Charlie Hebdo at my newspaper. The shooting continued. I asked myself if I was going to get a bullet in the head, in the lungs, I was counting the seconds because I said every second that passes could be my last.”
Riss said he did not move a muscle as the gunmen continued firing and killing.
“Then it finished, not a sound, a total terrible silence.”
Around him were the bodies of his colleagues and friends. “I didn’t want to see that. A few minutes before they were all there, all living, I made an effort not to look at the scene … I started to feel pain.” He said he heard colleagues crying in the next room.
In the dock of the Paris court are 11 men suspected of helping the Kouachi brothers carry out the attack and aiding Amédy Coulibaly, a third gunman, who shot dead a police woman the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, before killing four people and taking hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in the French capital.
All three gunmen died in separate police shootouts on 8 January 2015. Three suspects, who of whom are believed to have died in Syria, are being tried in absentia.
Earlier on Wednesday, Simon Fieschi, Charlie Hebdo’s webmaster who was the first shot after the Kouachi brothers entered the newspaper’s offices, said five years on he was still in almost constant pain.
Fieschi spent eight months in hospital and then long years in physiotherapy but said he still had to work at overcoming physical paralysis and debilitating fatigue.
“I hear us described as those who escaped. I don’t feel like that. To my knowledge, none of those who was there that day escaped what happened.”
