Petitjean and another 19-year-old, Adel Kermiche, were killed by police as they left the church Tuesday in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray after having fatally slashed the throat of the elderly priest.
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Adel Kermiche, also 19, was named on Wednesday.
Police have identified the second man as Abdel-Malik Nabil Petitjean from a town in eastern France on the border with Germany, a judicial source told Reuters. The BBC said French police were already searching for Petitjean for several days before the attack.
However, Petitjean never went to Syria but instead returned nearly immediately to France, the security official said, and was back inside the country long before his name was added June 29 to France’s watch list.
The two men, who pledge allegiance to ISIS in a video recorded before the attack, stormed a church service, forced the Catholic priest to his knees, slit his throat, and then filmed themselves preaching in Arabic at the altar.
Sparking particular ire was the revelation that Kermiche had been released from prison while awaiting trial on terror charges after his second attempt to travel to Syria.
French authorities have struggled to monitor thousands of domestic Islamic radicals who, like Kermiche, are on a list used to flag radicalized individuals considered a threat to national security.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) released on Wednesday a video that purportedly shows the two men pledging allegiance to the group, which is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and operates in parts of Syria and Iraq.
The last that 45-year-old Yamina Petitjean had heard from her son was on Monday 25 July, the day before the attack, when he said he was travelling to visit a cousin. It took a while after the Normandy attack for police to definitively link the attacker – who had been shot in the face by police – to the photograph sent from overseas and the identity card.
French President Francois Hollande is under pressure after criticism over the way his government has handled the surge in attacks.
Petitjean was on Thursday identified as the subject of the mysterious tip-off from overseas that a “person already on French soil” was planning an attack.
Two opposition lawmakers on Thursday submitted a draft bill to parliament that would prohibit the media from publishing the identities and photographs of militant attackers to prevent their names being glorified in death.
Mohammed Karabila, leader of the regional council of Muslim worship in the area, had just two questions following the attack: “How could a person wearing an electronic bracelet carry out an attack?”
Hollande’s predecessor and potential opponent in a presidential election next year, Nicolas Sarkozy, has said the government must take stronger steps to track known Islamist sympathizers.
The tag did not send an alarm because the attack took place during the four-hour period when he was allowed out.
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Muslims, too, planned homages in the coming days.
