An appeal is due to start on Monday as two men ruled they had their convictions overturned for helping armed Islamists prepare for a deadly attack on the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015.

Twelve people were killed in the magazine’s Paris office by brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who said they were acting on behalf of al-Qaeda to avenge Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The killings signaled the start of a deadly wave of Islamist attacks across Europe.

The first trial took place in 2020 with 14 defendants, some of whom were tried in absentia and accused of helping gunmen prepare and organize the attacks in the French capital.

Prison terms ranging from four years to life were handed out to those convicted of helping gunmen who attacked the magazine’s office and customers in a Jewish supermarket.

Only two, those with the heaviest sentences, have appealed.

Ali Riza Polat, 37, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after it was ruled he helped brothers Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly obtain guns.

Coulibaly was responsible for the murder of a French police officer and a hostage situation at a Hyper Cacher market that killed four Jewish men in the same month as the January attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Polat’s lawyers have argued that the appeal is a last chance to “right the wrongs of a justice system that is overwhelmed by the scale of these attacks.”

They said he was “mistakenly attributed a role he never played” in the attacks.

The other defendant, Amar Ramdani, was sentenced to 20 years in prison – the maximum legal limit – for supplying arms and financing the attacks.

Brothers Kouachi and Coulibaly were killed in a police attack.

The appeals court has six weeks to consider the couple’s level of responsibility.

Several days before the trial begins, testimonies are taken from survivors of the attack and relatives of the victims.

Those shot dead in the Charlie Hebdo office included some of France’s most famous cartoonists, including Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, 76, Georges Wolinski, 80, and Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, 47.

The murders at Charlie Hebdo triggered a worldwide wave of solidarity with France under the motto “I am Charlie”.

Later that year, in November 2015, Paris came under renewed attack when Islamist gunmen rioted at the Bataclan concert hall, the National Stadium and a variety of bars and restaurants.

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