Hollande said Tuesday that the attackers acted in the name of ISIS, and the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq released a statement, posted by the group’s supporters, claiming the Normandy attackers were the terror outfit’s “soldiers”.
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In it, Kermiche identifies himself by the nom de guerre Abul Jaleel al-Hanafi, and says his compatriot, who has not been identified by French authorities, is called Ibn Omar.
One of the attackers has been identified as 19-year-old Adel Kermiche by French police.
The footage shows the pair with an IS banner, as one of them speaks in Arabic and declares backing for the group’s leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
In a boost for the embattled government, a police internal affairs probe said the security contingent on the night of the Nice attack was “not undersized”.
Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said 4,000 members of the Sentinel military force were being deployed in Paris, while 6,000 had been sent to patrol in the provinces.
Once suspects pass from French police supervision into the country’s judicial system, he said, they are relatively unsupervised, as the French Justice Ministry lacks the security resources of the Interior Ministry. Local law enforcement reported that the priest’s throat was slit in the attack, and that both of the hostage takers were shot dead by police.
He expressed solidarity with local Catholics, saying “they have been terribly hit by the killing of the parish priest by two terrorists claiming to belong to Daesh”. “He (the priest) fell down looking upwards, toward us”.
They made their way to a makeshift memorial to lay flowers, candles and messages of peace – a ritual that has become chillingly familiar from Brussels and Paris to Nice and Munich, all cities that have been struck by attackers inspired by the Islamic State group.
Despite prosecutors’ protests, he was released in March this year on the condition he wear an electronic monitoring tag and could only leave his home between the hours of 8.30 a.m. and 12.30 p.m. on weekdays.
Kermiche’s tag did not send an alarm because the attack took place during the four hour period when he was allowed out.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Kermiche twice tried to travel to Syria under a false identity. He was still being questioned Wednesday.
“We must lead this war with all our means”, he said, adding that he was calling a meeting on Wednesday of representatives of all religions.
The rector of the main Paris mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, said France’s Muslims must push for better training of Muslim clerics and urged that reforming French Muslim institutions be put on the agenda. He did not elaborate.
Pope Francis said “the world is at war” but argued that religion was not the cause. “The others want war”.
On Tuesday morning, two attackers entered a church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in northern France during mass.
An 18-year-old neighbor said he had seen Kermiche just three days earlier in nearby Rouen wearing a long Islamic robe. Authorities have already warned that new attacks are being planned in France and other European countries, and we must be ready to respond accordingly.
The town mayor, Hubert Wulfranc, in tears, denounced the “barbarism” and, breaking down, pleaded, “Let us together be the last to cry”.
The priest “tried to fight … but, well, he is 86 years old”, she said, describing the attack as “cowardly”.
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Here are five facts about the murderer Adel Kermiche and the bad tragedy in which a French priest was killed in a hostage attack claimed by ISIS.
