A white rose is attached to a post in front of the church a day after a hostage-taking in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen in Normandy, France, where French priest, Father Jacques Hamel, was killed with a knife and another hostage seriously wounded.
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French police have named the second Normandy hostage-taker who appeared in an Islamic State video released after the murder of a Catholic priest as Abdel Malik Nabil Petitjean.
It is not known whether this is the second attacker, whose face was badly disfigured by the police shooting.
It warned police that the person – without a name but who turned out to be Petitjean – “could be ready to participate in an attack on national territory”.
Petitjean, 19, had no previous convictions and police did not have his fingerprints or DNA on file, which slowed his identification.
The Islamic State group claimed the attack.
Since the two most recent attacks the government has said that summer festivals that do not meet tight security standards are to be cancelled.
A security official confirmed that he was the unidentified man pictured on a photo distributed to French police on July 22 with a warning that he could be planning an attack.
A Tunisian delivery man ran his truck through a crowd in Nice on Bastille Day, killing 84 people.
The attack is the third in two weeks in France and Germany in which jihadists have pledged allegiance to IS, increasing jitters in Europe over young, often unstable men being lured by the group’s propaganda and calls to carry out attacks in their home countries.
She said the family, who had flagged him to authorities, did not know where to turn.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned against vilifying all Muslims after the attack, saying the goal of the terrorists is to “set the French people against each other, attack religion in order to start a war of religions”.
Kermiche was identified via fingerprints after the attack, which French President Francois Hollande called a “cowardly assassination” committed in the name of ISIS.
It remains unclear if Petitjean was a known individual by authorities before the attack.
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On Wednesday, the two were shown in video released by the Islamic State group, pledging their allegiance to the self-proclaimed caliphate. In 2015, attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine, in January and several locations in Paris in November killed almost 150 people. They were killed after storming the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray where they forced Fr Jacques to kneel as they filmed his throat being cut.
