As frightful as each and every one of the previous attacks has been, attacking an elderly priest during a Mass inside his church seems even more disgusting.
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Kermiche and his accomplice entered the centuries-old stone church of Saint Etienne, taking hostage the priest, Jacques Hamel, three nuns and two worshippers.
Police have now identified both teenagers IS says were responsible for the attack, one was being electronically monitored having tried twice to reach Syria. The exact timeline of the attack is still unclear.
The elderly woman identified only as Jeanine told RMC radio that her husband played dead to stay alive. One nun escaped and gave the alert.
France is in a state of emergency following a string of terrorist attacks.
More than 50 mass events planned in France this summer are to be held under a tightened security regime, and some may be even cancelled, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said, as reported by AP.
Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said 4,000 members of the Sentinel military force were being deployed in Paris, while 6,000 had been sent to patrol in the provinces. They were being bolstered by tens of thousands of police and reservists.
Hollande, meanwhile, presided over a defense council and cabinet meeting Wednesday in Paris after speaking with Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish leaders.
“We can not allow ourselves to be dragged into the politics of Daech (Islamic State), which wants to set the children of the same family against each other”, the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, told journalists after the meeting at the Elysee presidential palace.
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.
As authorities looked for ways to prevent extremist attacks, gruesome details of the church attack trickled out.
“Several elements lead us to believe he is the second attacker”, said one of the sources close to the investigation.
A man detained after the attack was still being held for questioning, the prosecutor’s office said.
Kermiche was detained outside France, sent home, handed preliminary terrorism charges and placed under house arrest with a tracking bracelet, allowing him free movement within the region for four hours a day, Molins said.
The growing consensus in the French media is at odds with standard procedure by security services, the judiciary and politicians, who swiftly name attackers when their identities are confirmed. They made their way to a makeshift memorial to lay flowers, candles and messages of peace – a ritual that has become chillingly familiar from Brussels and Paris to Nice and Munich, all cities that have been struck by attackers inspired by the Islamic State group.
Young and old in the Normandy town were stunned by the attack. “I was sure”, the 18-year-old said, adding that Kermiche told friends that he had been promised women and the chance to “save his brothers” in Syria.
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“But he would quote the Koran to us, saying France is the land of the unbelievers, and we should go to Syria and fight”, he continued. “When we saw the knife in the right hand I said to myself, ‘well, something’s really going to happen there, ‘” she said.
