Police had been hunting the second teenager who killed a priest in a church in France this week after a foreign intelligence tipoff that a suspected jihadist might be preparing an attack, police and judicial sources said.
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During the siege they killed a priest in his 80s by slitting his throat and seriously injured another captive.
United Kingdom newspapers The Telegraph and The Daily Mail called the assailants “Islamic gunman” and said the killers claimed they were from Daesh.
They said Abdel Malik “strongly resembles” a man hunted by anti-terrorism police in the days before the attack over fears he was about to carry out an act of terror.
Petitjean was on Thursday identified as the subject of the mysterious tip-off from overseas that a “person already on French soil” was planning an attack. He was forced to wear an electronic monitoring tag after he traveled overseas to try to fight in Syria, Molins said.
Some leading French media outlets pledged Wednesday to stop publishing the names and images of attackers linked to the Islamic State group to prevent individuals from being inadvertently glorified, following a spate of attacks in France over the past 18 months.
Days after 19-year-old Adel Kermiche from Northern France was identified as one of the two men who raided the Church of the Gambetta in the Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray district of Normandy on Tuesday, the second assailant has also been identified as 19-year-old Abdel-Malik Nabil Petitjean from Eastern France.
It is unclear whether Petitjean was also known to authorities.
Footage shows a heavily armed elite unit moving in on a Normandy church and pointing guns towards the entrance. “He turned around” and returned to France on June 11.
The rector of the main Paris mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, said France’s Muslims must push for better training of Muslim clerics and urged that reforming French Muslim institutions be put on the agenda, but without elaborating.
Police had no name, only a photograph, that appears to be of Petitjean, RTL radio said.
President Francois Hollande has said France will form a National Guard from reserve forces, in an attempt to prevent further attacks.
UCLAT, an agency that coordinates the anti-terrorist fight, said it obtained the photo from a trusted source.
The ISIS-affiliated Amaq news agency released a video Wednesday of two men it said were the church attackers pledging allegiance to the group’s leader.
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”.
The French government has faced strong criticism from political opponents over perceived security failings since the Bastille Day lorry attack in Nice two weeks ago in which more than 80 people died.
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Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve rejected Sarkozy’s proposal, saying that to jail them would be unconstitutional and counterproductive. Investigators insisted there was no evidence the three were in any way connected to the attack.
