He is a close associate of the Hyper Cacher murderer, Amedy Coulibaly, and was the main defendant in the trials for the January 2015 attacks, to the extent that he was sentenced to life imprisonment on appeal for ‘aiding and abetting terrorist murders’, as the judiciary described him as a man of ‘extreme dangerousness’.
The 39-year-old Ali Riza Polat, who is in solitary confinement in Laon prison (Aisne), is suspected of attacking two prison officers with two pieces of glass early on Tuesday morning while shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ (Allah is great). The two officers had just returned to his cell when the inmate attacked them. One of them was slightly injured in the forearm, while the second was taken hostage by the man running amok. After negotiations, Ali Riza Polat finally loosened his grip, put down his homemade weapons and surrendered.
The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) took over the investigation into the ‘attempted murder of persons belonging to the public administration in connection with a terrorist project and in a state of legal recidivism’. The investigation was entrusted to the Coordinating Sub-Department for Anti-Terrorism (SDAT), the Zonal Directorate of the National Police (DZPN) in Lille and the General Directorate for Internal Security (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure). The suspect’s hearing is intended to shed light on the motives for his offence.
‘I never wanted to go out one morning to destroy the lives of these people (…) I am not Coulibaly. (…) I am innocent of the offences I am accused of,’ said Ali Riza Polat, who was born in Turkey and came to France at the age of three, at his last trial. He was accused of providing Amedy Coulibaly with a bag of weapons containing Kalashnikovs and Tokarev pistols. However, the 30-year-old had always denied knowing about the use of the arsenal of weapons and imagined a robbery.
Ali Riza Polat, who was born into a family of Alevis, a branch of Islam, and does not practise, had declared that he had converted to Islam in 2014. However, he had always rejected any extremist practice of his religion and any approval of terrorist theories. ‘I am a Muslim, I am a believer. I pray my five daily prayers, but I also do my rubbish on the side (…) I have never said that I am in a religious struggle. I have no hatred against anyone’.
However, his statements did not convince the anti-terrorist judiciary. ‘The court has no doubt (…) that Ali Riza Polat (…) was guilty, with full knowledge of the facts, of complicity in the terrorist acts committed jointly by the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly by providing the latter with constant assistance in the preparation of his crimes and in procuring the means to commit them,’ the judges stated in justifying their decision.