Police identify 2nd church attacker
The second man who attacked a Normandy church during a morning Mass this week, slitting the throat of the elderly priest, is a 19-year-old Frenchman from eastern France, the prosecutor’s office said on Thursday.
An official in the prosecutor’s office said it was “very probable” that the man, identified as Abdel-Malik Nabil Petit Jean, was the same man pictured in a photo distributed to police services four days before the attack. The information accompanying the photo of an unidentified man said the person pictured “could be ready to participate in an attack on national territory”.
UCLA T, an agency that coordinates the anti-terrorist fight, said it obtained the photo from a trusted source.
Petit Jean and another 19-year-old, Adel Kermiche, were killed by police as they left the church on Tuesday in Saint Etienne-d u-Rouv ray.
Petit Jean was born in Saint Die des Vosges, France, the prosecutor’s office said. He was identified via his DNA. Kermiche was from Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
A man detained after the attack was still being held for questioning.
The attack was claimed by the Islamic State group, which released a video on Wednesday allegedly showing Kermiche and his accomplice clasping hands and pledging allegiance to the group.
The church attack came less than two weeks after an attack by a man barreling his truck down a pedestrian zone in Nice that killed 84 people celebrating France’s national day.
Merkel’s pledge
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged on Thursday to do “everything humanly possible” to ensure security in her country following a string of attacks—including two carried out by asylum seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, which she said mocked the country that took in the assailants.
She promised at a news conference to do everything to clear up the “barbaric acts”, find out who was behind them and bring them to justice.
German police on Wednesday arrested a 19-year-old Algerian refugee who had fled a psychiatric facility earlier in the day yelling, “I’ll blow you up ”, ending the latest ina string of incidents that have set the country’s nerves on edge.
Federal police arrested the asylum-seeker at the Bremen main train station after an hourslong manhunt that prompted the evacuation of a Bremen shopping center, according to police in the neighboring state of Lower Saxony.