Charlie Hebdo: Suspected accomplices go on trial for Paris attacks

Fourteen alleged accomplices to the gunmen who attacked French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have gone on trial five years after three days of terror sent shock waves through France. 

The events that began on January 7, 2015 sparked a series of attacks on French soil, including "lone wolf" killings by people said to be inspired by the Daesh group that have since claimed more than 250 lives.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex wrote in a tweet the simple words "always Charlie".

On January 7, 2015, brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, armed with automatic weapons, went on a rampage in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, whose satire on race, religion and politics tested the limits of what society would accept in the name of free speech.

They killed 12 in the attack claimed by terrorist group al Qaeda.

The following day, Amedy Coulibaly, an acquaintance of Cherif Kouachi, shot dead a female police officer. On January 9, he killed four Jewish men at a kosher supermarket. In a video, he said he acted in the name of Daesh.

The three were killed by police in different stand-offs.

READ MORE: France remembers Charlie Hebdo attack victims

Hearings began under heavy security as eleven of the suspects appeared in the courtroom, facing charges of conspiracy in a terrorist act or association with a terror group. The charges also include financing terrorism, membership in a terrorist organisation and supplying weapons to the attackers.

The defendants under trial but not in the courtroom include Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly's partner at the time of the attacks, and brothers Mohamed and Mehdi Belhoucine. All three travelled to areas of Syria under Daesh control days before the attacks and may be dead.

Security officers wearing balaclavas and bullet-proof vests took up positions, before defendants were brought in to the room.

Militant violence in France

More than 250 people have been killed in France in militant violence since the attacks, which laid bare France's struggle to counter the threat of homegrown militants and foreign militants.

Charlie Hebdo republished on Wednesday a series of cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad, including one of him in a bomb-shaped turban, that stirred outrage in the Muslim world when they were first published nearly a decade before the attacks.

At the time, al Qaeda's Yemen branch placed Charlie Hebdo's then-director on its "wanted list".

"We will never lie down. We will never give up," editor Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau wrote, explaining the decision to re-publish the cartoons.

On the trial's eve, President Emmanuel Macron said France would remember the slain. The freedom to blaspheme went in hand in hand with the freedom of belief in France, he continued.

"Satire is not a discourse of hate," the president told a news conference in Beirut.

READ MORE: Macron: I won't condemn caricatures of 'Prophet Muhammad'