A prosecutor says two men who attacked a Normandy church and killed a priest had fake explosives and used nuns as human shields.
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Two men took hostages at a Catholic church in Normandy and slit the throat of the priest.
Several worshippers were taken hostage in the attack and one has been left in a serious condition as it emerged the Catholic church was named on an ISIS hit list a year ago.
An unidentified source in the Paris prosecutor’s office told The Associated Press that one person had been detained in connection to the investigation.
Police said it appeared the attackers had slit the priest’s throat with a knife.
Additional details of the terror attack indicate that the suspect was on France’s terror watch list, and that the church in question had appeared on an ISIS list of targets previous year. One of the attackers shouted, “Allahu Akbar” – Arabic for “God is the greatest” – as the two attackers left the church, following two of the nuns and one of the parishioners, Molins said.
Archbishop Dominique Lebrun of Rouen also reacted to the attack from Krakow.
The Vatican condemned what it said was a “barbarous killing”.
Another hostage was injured and remained “between life and death” in hospital last night, the Interior Ministry said. The Islamic State group took responsibility for the attack. A church outside Paris was targeted a year ago, but the attack was never carried out.
The latest attack came 12 days after 84 people were killed on Bastille Day (July 14) in Nice by a lone terrorist, possibly inspired by the Islamic State, who drove a large truck through the crowd.
Last summer, it said to target “traffic areas, such as tourist sites, supermarkets, synagogues, churches, Masonic Lodges, the permanence of political parties”. She said the radicals told her, “You Christians – you kill us”.
SIEGEL: Was the idea of an attack on a church something that French authorities were expecting at all?
News agency Amaq, which is affiliated with Islamic State, a group France is bombing in Iraq and Syria as part of a USA -led coalition, said two of its “soldiers” had carried out the attack.
The teenager was arrested outside France and put under house arrest with an electronic surveillance.
“The whole free world must understand that our values are under attack”. It’s a horror, ‘ She said of her dead colleague: ‘He was an extraordinary priest.
The assailant, who was known to France’s anti-terrorism police, tried twice to go to Syria in 2015.
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Hollande visited the scene with Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, meeting members of the emergency services.
