The two men stormed into a church in the northern town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray during morning mass Tuesday and slit the 86-year-old priest’s throat at the altar before being gunned down by police. 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.
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The other attacker in the matter was named as Adel Kermiche.
They held five people hostage – the priest, two nuns and an elderly couple – before fatally slashing the priest’s throat and seriously wounding the other man.
The prosecution source said Petitjean had no prior convictions and police did not have his fingerprints or DNA on file, which had slowed the identification of his body.
The radio said that Petitjean had tried to get to Syria to fight with IS but had been detained in Turkey, sent back to France and placed on the watch list.
Hauchard, who also frequented the mosque of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, appeared in a 2014 video of the beheading of American aid worker Peter Kassig and 18 Syrian military captives.
“But he didn’t go to Syria”, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and asked not to be identified by name.
The jihadist micro-network included the notorious Islamist Maxime Hauchard, who joined the Islamic State in Syria in August 2013.
France’s intelligence services had received a tipoff from a foreign intelligence agency that an attack was being planned and subsequently sent out a photo to various security forces, a source close to the investigation said. “The date, the target and the modus operandi of these actions are for the moment unknown”. It is unclear whether Petitjean was also known to authorities. The man came from a pool of 10,500 radicalized people now under government surveillance on suspicion of radicalization.
“The two executors of the attack on a church in Normandy, France, were soldiers of the Islamic State”, the news agency quoted the Islamic State.
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However a march on Thursday in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray is still expected to take place.
