Richard Malka, center, a lawyer for Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper arrives at the courtroom before the 2015 attacks trial, Sept 2, 2020 in Paris. Thirteen men and a woman go on trial Wednesday over the 2015 attacks against a satirical newspaper and a kosher supermarket in Paris that marked the beginning of a wave of violence by the Islamic State group in Europe. Seventeen people and all three gunmen died during the three days of attacks in January 2015. (FRANCOIS MORI / AP)

PARIS - Fourteen alleged accomplices to the Islamist gunmen who attacked the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo went on trial on Wednesday, as the country recalled, five years on, a dark episode that marked the onset of a wave of militant violence.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex wrote in a tweet the simple words: “Always Charlie”.

The 14 suspected accomplices, three of whom will be tried in absentia and may be dead, face charges including financing terrorism, membership in a terrorist organization and supplying weapons to the attackers

On Jan 7, 2015, Said and Cherif Kouachi, armed with automatic weapons, went on the rampage in the 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 an attack claimed by al Qaeda.

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

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

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In the courtroom on Wednesday, security officers wearing balaclavas and bullet-proof vests took up positions, before defendants were brought in to the room.

The 14 suspected accomplices, three of whom will be tried in absentia and may be dead, face charges including financing terrorism, membership in a terrorist organisation and supplying weapons to the attackers.

In this Jan 14, 2015 file photo, flowers lay outside Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris. (JACQUES BRINON / AP)

The defendants 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 Islamic State’s control days before the attacks and may be dead.

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

Charlie Hebdo republished on Wednesday a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, 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”.

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