The incident took place around 9:30 during morning Mass on Tuesday at a parish church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, a community of 29,000 people near the city of Rouen, about 75 miles northwest of Paris.
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Petitjean and Adel Kermiche, the first formally identified attacker, seized six hostages in a church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, north France before killing an elderly priest and seriously wounding another hostage.
Prosecutor Francois Molins said the attackers had been carrying a “fake explosive device covered in aluminium foil” along with hand-held weapons when they entered the Catholic church.
The source said that Turkey was informed by French authorities on May 12, 2015 that Adel Kermiche meant to travel from Geneva to Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen Airport (SAW) under the name “Kevin Kermiche”.
Petitjean, thought to be aged 20 and like 19-year-old Kermiche on France’s terror watch list, was reportedly identified by an ID found at the scene of the attack.
The video, posted on the Isis news agency Amaq, shows two young men with an Isis banner, as one of them recites in Arabic in a strong non-native accent a traditional pledge of allegiance to the group’s head.
Petitjean was born in eastern France, in Saint-Die-des-Vosges, but recently lived in Aix-les-Bains, where his mother lives, the prosecutor’s office said.
The latest revelations about Tuesday’s attack are likely to add pressure on authorities over their protocol for monitoring suspected militants, as well as increase calls to boost intelligence services amid a greater shift to focusing on potential homegrown radicals rather than those returning from overseas. The video claimed the two men were the church attackers pledging allegiance to the group’s leader. French President Francois Hollande today brushed aside comments by White House hopeful Donald Trump that France was “no longer” the country it was because of a string of deadly jihadist attacks. 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.
A Tunisian delivery man ran his truck through a crowd in Nice on Bastille Day, killing 84 people.
It said the person in the photo “could already be present in France and act alone or with other individuals”.
Police said they discovered a copy of the Syrian’s passport at Kermiche’s family home.
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Isis claimed Tuesday’s attack on a church in France during which an 86-year-old priest’s throat was cut, saying it had been carried out by two of its “soldiers”. “I don’t know what happened to him, it was a real brainwashing”.
