A somber quiet surrounded Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, a suburb of the medieval city of Rouen composed of genteel residential neighborhoods and working-class quarters with massive apartment blocks.
Advertisement
Reports state the two attackers shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they ran out of the church.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the killing, describing the terrorists as soldiers.
UPDATE 20:45 PM: French 19-year-old Adel Kermich has been named as one of the killers, and was the attacker who committed the beheading of Father Jacques Hamel. “We will stand together”.
A French police source told CNN that one of the church attackers had tried to go to fight in Syria past year but had been stopped in Turkey by authorities there.
The prosecutor’s office said the identification of the two suspects was still under way.
A priest was killed in the attack, and the men took two nuns and two churchgoers hostage.
“I cry out to God with all men of good will”, said the archbishop of Rouen Dominique Lebrun in a press release issued by the Rouen diocese, in which the church lies.
One of the attackers was carrying a “fake explosive device covered in aluminium foil” and three knives, and the other was holding in his hand a kitchen timer covered in foil, and carrying a backpack containing a similar fake bomb.
French President Francois Hollande called the killing and hostage-taking a “vile terrorist attack” and reiterated France’s commitment to battling the Islamic State. France is also under a state of emergency and has extra police presence in the wake of the Nice attack in which a man barreled his truck down the city’s famed Promenade des Anglais, mowing down holiday crowds.
“We must lead this war with all our means”, he said, adding that he was calling a meeting on Wednesday of representatives of all religions.
The Daily Sun is reporting that the church was on a terrorist “hit list” which French police have known about since April 2015, andYnet reports one of the knifemen tried to travel to Syria in 2015.
But this did not stop him becoming involved in today’s atrocity, in which Father Jacques Hamel, 86, had his throat cut.
A spokesperson for the Vatican said: “The Pope condemns in the strongest terms possible all forms of violence and of hatred”.
Pope Francis decried what he called the “pain and horror” of what happened.
Islamic State extremists have urged followers to attach churches in France, The AP reported.
According to France’s National Human Rights Commission (CNCDH) there were 429 anti-Muslim threats and attacks in 2015 – a rise of 223% from the previous year.
French authorities increased security at places of worship after attacks in Paris a year ago, but ensuring constant, blanket security is hard in a country with a church in every town and village. He is charged with killing a young woman inside her auto the same day.
Ireland’s prime minister says it is “particularly brutal” that people have been attacked in a church, a traditional place of sanctuary.
Advertisement
The attack is the latest in a series of deadly attacks in Europe, including the one in Nice on Bastille Day that killed 84 people.
