Both attackers were later killed by authorities. He was also put on France’s terror watch list, known as Fiche S, which now has 20,000 names on it. With all this information, the French authorities are under pressure to explain why Kermiche was released while he awaited trial after his second detainment.
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The second attacker was identified by his DNA as Abdelmalek Petitjean, a 19-year-old French-born national from the Savoie mountain region in southeastern France, according to statements from the prosecutor’s office.
On Wednesday, French President Francois Hollande met with religious leaders in an attempt to assuage fears and create interfaith solidarity after this latest in a string of terror attacks in France.
Four days before the assault that led to the horrific murder of Father Hamel a French anti-terror agency issued a photo of Petitjean warning that he “could be ready to participate in an attack on national territory”.
Days before the church attack counter-terrorist police in France were warned he could be about to act.
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”.
Wuithin short time, the two were identified as Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean.
While it’s uncertain what caused Petitjean to turn around, in recent months Islamic State propaganda has encouraged Western recruits not to join extremists in the war zones in Syria or Iraq but to remain home and carry out attacks.
The Islamic State (ISIL or Daesh) jihadist group claimed responsibility for the attack.
A photograph of the man said to be planning the attack had been supplied but not his name.
The two jihadists pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, a video posted on the Islamic State group news agency Amaq showed Wednesday.
“Those who drape themselves in the finery of religion to hide their deadly project, those who tell us of a God of death, a Moloch (false god) who rejoices in the death of man and promises heaven to those that kill by invoking him”.
Kermiche was rapidly identified as he had been under house arrest, and was wearing a monitoring bracelet, after being arrested in Turkey for trying to reach Syria.
In the southern city of Nice, 84 people were killed on July 14 by a man who drove a truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day while firing a handgun.
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Meanwhile, Austria has handed over to France two suspected members of the same ISIS cell that massacred 130 people in Paris last November, prosecutors said yesterday.
