Police were still seeking to identify the second of the two attackers and raids were underway, Molins told a news conference after the attack in which a priest was killed. Molins said the other is still being identified. Kermiche was known to anti-terror authorities after two attempts in 2015 to travel overseas – at least once to Syria – using a relative’s identification, Molins said.
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Speaking to journalists in the northern town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, where two men took five people hostage during morning Mass Tuesday, Hollande said the attack was a “cowardly assassination” carried out by “by two terrorists in the name of Daesh” – another name for ISIS.
Sister Daniele Delafosse was able to escape the attack, she said, according to CNN French affiliate BFMTV.
Earlier in the day, a nun who had been in the church at the time of the attack, said the knifemen performed an “Arabic sermon” before killing the priests.
Meanwhile, Francois Molins said one of the men who attacked a Normandy church evaded police twice using relatives’ ID cards in attempts to reach Syria.
One of the attackers suspected of killing a priest at a church in north France was on probation and wearing a surveillance tag, officials say.
France is on high alert and under a state of emergency after an attack in the southern city of Nice on Bastille Day – July 14 – that killed 84 people that was claimed by the Islamic State group, as well as a series of attacks past year that killed 147 others around Paris.
He is also said to be friends with known jihadi Maxime Hauchard.
A make-shift memorial in front of the city hall in the Normandy city of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray after Father Jacques Hamel was killed in his church. They described him as open and kind.
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Kermiche, was a local teenager whose parents flagged his radical behaviour to authorities and grew up in a housing project in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, the town where father Jacques Hamel was slain.
