Survivors of the Charlie Hebdo attack fled a courtroom in tears after they were shown CCTV footage of the gruesome massacre on Monday.
The court in Paris sat through the graphic images showing the scenes during and after the 2015 newsroom attack.
The trial of 14 suspects accused of aiding the two gunmen who stormed the offices of the French satirical cartoon opened last week and is set to run until November.
Survivors of the Charlie Hebdo attack fled a courtroom in tears after they were shown CCTV footage of the gruesome massacre on Monday. Pictured: two masked gunmen brandishing Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers during the 2015 killings
The court’s presiding judge, Regis de Jorna, said as she showed the footage on Monday: ‘Some people may find these scenes disturbing.’
Once the viewing started, some attack survivors left the room in tears, while in the box of the accused, some watched while others looked away.
‘What we’ve just seen is inhuman,’ said Caty Richard, a lawyer for one of the civil parties. ‘They were killing machines.’
This court sketch made last week at the Paris courthouse shows the fourteen accused and their lawyers at the opening of the trial of the accomplices in Charlie Hebdo jihadist killings in 2015
It was 11:33 am on Wednesday, January 7, 2015, when the Kouachi brothers, Cherif and Said, entered Charlie Hebdo’s premises in Paris and killed 10 people in under two minutes.
In total 12 people, including some of France’s most celebrated cartoonists, were gunned down at the scene.
The former head of the Paris police’s anti-terror unit, Christian Deau, walked the court through the chilling events of the day.
The first of the graphic pictures, taken by police right after their arrival, showed the entrance used by the two brothers just before shooting the paper’s webmaster, Simon Fieschi, who was later evacuated, seriously injured.
In the adjacent room Moustapha Ourrad, a copy editor who worked at Charlie Hebdo for 30 years, lay in a pool of his own blood.
A picture of the main conference room shows a tangle of bodies, dead or dying amid printers and stacks of printing paper.
In total, 33 bullet cartridges were found at the crime scene, 21 from Cherif Kouachi’s weapon alone.
Police found seven rounds in the body of chief editor Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, fired at point-blank range of less than four inches, Deau said.
Police and emergency vehicles at the scene after the gun rampage at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in 2015 which left 12 people dead
The trajectory of the bullets found in the bodies of most of the murdered cartoonists were consistent with execution-style killings from behind, Dead added.
Closed-circuit video recordings showed the killers seemingly calm and determined during the attack, and also during their getaway when they casually killed a police officer, Ahmed Merabet, who was already on the ground.
Following a sustained exchange of fire with several police units, the two killers abandoned their vehicle whose windows had been shot to pieces.
The Kouachi brothers, Cherif (left) and Said (right), entered Charlie Hebdo’s premises in Paris and killed 10 people in under two minutes
Police later found enough extra weapons in the car to lead them to believe that the brothers may have been planning more attacks, Deau said.
Police killed the brothers two days later after a manhunt.
Fourteen suspected accomplices are on trial in connection with the killings, and with a related attack on a Jewish supermarket.
The killings sparked a series of attacks on French soil, including ‘lone wolf’ attacks by people said to be inspired by the Islamic State group that have since claimed more than 250 lives.
A message of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo – containing the popular slogan ‘je suis Charlie’ (meaning ‘I am Charlie’) – is laid out in Paris after the attack in 2015
Hearings began last week under heavy security as eleven of the suspects faced the court on charges of conspiracy in a terrorist act or association with a terror group.
Three others, including the wife of one of the gunmen, are being tried in absentia because they fled to IS-held territory in Syria days before the 2015 attacks.
The court is to hear the testimony of survivors on Tuesday and Wednesday.