The church attack came less than two weeks after a man barrelled his truck down a pedestrian zone in Nice, on the Riviera, that killed 84 people celebrating France’s national day, Bastille Day.
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The second teenager involved in the killing of a priest in a church in France this week was a 19-year-old who was known to security services as a potential Islamist militant, police and judicial sources said on Thursday.
The priest, along with three nuns and two churchgoers, had been taken hostage by the terrorists, who were shot dead as they ran from the building shouting “Allahu Akbar”.
Police had earlier identified the first attacker as 19-year-old Adel Kermiche.
The video released by IS shows two men speaking in Arabic and referring to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
President Francois Hollande, members of his government and opposition rivals gathered together on Wednesday at the symbolic Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris for a mass attended by Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders to pay tribute to the murdered priest.
On Tuesday, IS said the two assailants were its “soldiers” and the attack retribution for France’s fight against the jihadists in the Middle East.
Those who knew Father Jacques Hamel described him as a dedicated and courageous man who had pledged to serve his parish until his last breath. “Terrorists will not give up on anything until we stop them”.
Malik was identified as the subject of a mysterious tip-off from overseas last week that a “person already on French soil” was planning an attack.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for that attack, too, as well as two attacks that followed in Germany.
“All this violence and barbarism has paralyzed the French left since January 2015”, Sarkozy told the newspaper Le Monde. We are here to attack your country.
“It was religion above everything”, she said.
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.
The government, already under pressure after the Nice attack, faced more questions over security weaknesses after it emerged Kermiche was known to anti-terror investigators.
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.
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Ankara deported one of the attackers in a church in Normandy and subsequently notified French authorities regarding the issue, a senior Turkish official told the Daily Sabah on Thursday.
