A police source said yesterday the Syrian man was arrested near a refugee centre in the rural Allier region of central France, where Petitjean lived for four years with his parents until 2012, according to French media.
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The first story by the New York Times on this incident referred to the killers only as “attackers” and did not mention ISIS, Daesh or the words “Islamic” or “Islamist”.
Authorities in France are working to piece together any security lapses leading up to the attack.
Both of the attackers were shot dead by police after they took hostages. Kermiche had attempted twice to travel to Syria, but he was arrested in Turkey and returned to France, where he was released by a judge on an electronic monitoring bracelet.
Security services had in June opened a special file on Petitjean for becoming radicalised, a police source said separately.
Those who knew Kermiche in the Normandy town where he grew up said he appeared to think of little else other than trying to get to Syria to fight alongside extremist groups after the January 2015 attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
L’Express said French police suspected Petitjean’s identity but needed to wait for DNA testing through his mother because he died from a bullet in the face, making visual identification impossible.
Prosecutors said he was born in eastern France.
So-called Islamic State released a video of what it says are the two men pledging allegiance to the group.
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.
The French anti-terrorism coordinating agency, UCLAT, issued the photo of a man on July 22, warning 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”.
During the siege they killed a priest in his 80s by slitting his throat and seriously injured another captive.
President Francois Hollande has said France will form a National Guard from reserve forces, in an attempt to prevent further attacks.
In an editorial, Le Monde said it was doing so “to avoid giving posthumous credit” to those responsible, while adding that the intention of killing Father Hamel was to provoke “the blind vengeance that would place the entire country under the empire of hatred”.
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IS also claimed that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who ploughed a truck into a crowd in the French city of Nice on July 14, was one of their “soldiers”.
