The Men Who Killed a French Priest

He had attempted to enter Istanbul a year ago but was sent back to Switzerland, where he had traveled from, and French authorities were alerted, the official said.

The French prosecutor’s office on Thursday named the second attacker in the murder of a priest at a Normandy church as Abdel Malik Nabil Petitjean, a 19-year-old native of the eastern French region of Vosges.

It is not clear when it was filmed, but both men were killed by armed police who stormed the church after they attempted to take a group of nuns hostage at the church in St-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen.

It has also emerged that security services opened a special file on Petitjean, for becoming radicalised, in June.

Days before the murder, police were warned Frenchman Petitjean was back in his homeland, but they could not find him before he struck.

According to Amaq, the two were “soldiers of the Islamic State who carried out the attack in response to calls to target countries of the Crusader coalition”.

The other man is Adel Kermiche, 19, wearing a surveillance tag during the attack.

The French government has faced strong criticism from political opponents over perceived security failings since the Bastille Day lorry attack in Nice two weeks ago in which more than 80 people died.

After failed negotiations with a French police unit specialising in hostage situations, the BRI, the two attackers came out of the church behind three hostages, and rushed the officers shouting, “Allahu Akbar” (god is greatest).

The mother told reporters, “Daesh is not part of his language”, using an Arabic term for the Islamic State, and said of her son, “He is not an introvert; he has no psychological issues”.

The horrific video is just the latest sign that ISIS will increasingly rely on lone-wolf attacks on the West as its territory in the Middle East continues to shrink.

A copy of the Syrian’s passport was found at Kermiche’s family home, the police source said.

Mohammed Karabila, imam of the mosque in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, said the two religious communities had close relations in the small suberb.

Meanwhile, Austria has handed over to France two suspected members of the same ISIS cell that massacred 130 people in Paris last November, prosecutors said yesterday.

“There will be no silence here. or beyond”, Mayor Hubert Wulfranc said of the loss of the town’s 85-year-old priest in an address to hundreds.

“But he didn’t go to Syria”, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and asked not to be identified by name.