In Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, located near the northern city of Rouen, the two men stormed the 17th-century Église St Étienne church and took five people hostage, before killing the priest and leaving a worshipper in critical condition.
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French President Francois Hollande last night blasted the “cowards” who killed an elderly priest during a siege at a church yesterday.
Mohammed Karabila, who heads the regional council of Muslim worship for Haute Normandie, said he was “stunned by the death of my friend (Hamel)”.
“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, but without elaborating.
Hollande also met his defence and security chiefs, who tried to find new ways to reassure a jittery population as his government comes under fire from the opposition over the repeated attacks, some nine months ahead of a presidential election.
The French Police opened an investigation into the incident where the circumstances are still not clear but the French Prosecution clarified that it is being investigated as a terror attack.
The attackers killed the priest celebrating Mass, the Rev. Jacques Hamel, 85.
The man who killed a priest in a small village of Normandy was under police electronic surveillance during the assault.
France remains on high alert after a spate of attacks in the last 18 months linked to radical Islamism.
The prosecutor’s office said the identification of the two suspects was still underway and it was too early to jump to conclusions about a possible link.
A horrified local resident, Cecile Lefebre, said: “I have no words”. “Terrorists will not give up on anything until we stop them”. Two of its “soldiers”, it said, had attacked a church “in response to the call to target Crusader coalition states”.
‘They filmed themselves. It was like a sermon in Arabic around the altar, ‘ the nun added. They were captured as they exited the church.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the other victims of the attack as well as the parishioners and community members”, Price said.
One of the attackers has been named as 19-year-old Adel Kermiche. Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the other hostages were used as human shields to block police from entering. This sentiment is likely to be shared among French society more broadly. Kermiche had told him and other youth about his efforts to get to Syria and “he was saying we should go there and fight for our brothers”.
“We are scared”, said Mulas Arbanu.
“However, as we have seen, Daesh and other terrorist groups have targeted Christian as well as Jewish and other faith groups in the West and beyond”.
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France’s anti-terrorism unit said that Kermiche had been arrested in March 2015 in Germany, Bild reported, after trying to reach Syria via Turkey from Munich airport.
