French officials have identified the second man involved in the murder of a priest in a Normandy church.
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“Following DNA tests, it emerged that the terrorist has been identified as Abdel Malik Nabil Petitjean”, a source in the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
In northern Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray where 85-year-old priest Jacques Hamel was killed, Muslims and Christians gathered together in mourning after the attack that hit their town.
They slashed a priest’s throat and took three nuns and an elderly couple hostage. They were later shot and killed by police.
Prosecutor Francois Molins revealed Wednesday that Kermiche had also been flagged as a radicalized Islamist and was under house arrest at the time of the attack.
However during a raid on the home of the attacker, 19-year-old Adel Kermiche, police found an identity card belonging Abdel Malik Petitjean.
However a march on Thursday in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray is still expected to take place.
Valls, under fire for perceived security lapses around the attacks, also admitted a “failure” in the fact that one of the jihadists who stormed the church had been released with an electronic tag pending trial.
Meanwhile, the French anti-terrorism coordinating agency UCLAT issued a photo of Petitjean July 22 to police warning that he “could be ready to participate in an attack on national territory”. “We are going to destroy your country”, the man Amaq alleges is Petitjean says in the recording.
After the Nice massacre, Hollande announced that thousands of reservists would be called up to boost tired security forces after 18 months of heightened alert and relentless attacks.
President Francois Hollande and senior ministers have faced calls to resign over security failures in the run-up to the atrocities which have caused up to 250 deaths in France in the last 18 months.
The attack came less than two weeks after Mohamed Bouhlel ploughed a 19-tonne truck into revelers watching Bastille Day fireworks on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, in another attack claimed by ISIS.
Petitjean, the second assailant in Tuesday’s assault, was a known entity to law enforcement whose name was on the French terror watch list as an Islamic radical for attempting to travel to Syria via Turkey earlier this year.
The church is located about 104 kilometers north of Paris, where in November members of IS killed 130 people during coordinated attacks on the city.
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“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.
