Killer had tried to join Isis
On a somnolent midsummer weekday, only a devout few had gathered for midmorning Mass at St Etienne church in a quiet suburb of Rouen, a mediaeval French city best known for inspiring dreamlike Monet paintings.
For the two men who arrived with knives just before 10am, those few worshippers were audience enough. As the two parishioners and three nuns in attendance looked on in horror, the pair delivered an Arabic-language statement – which they videotaped – and then set upon the octogenarian priest who was presiding and slit his throat, according to officials and witnesses.
‘‘It was a horror,’’ one of the nuns, Sister Danielle, told French television.
‘‘Everyone was shouting, ‘Stop!’ We cried, ‘Stop, stop, you don’t know what you’re doing!’ But they forced him to his knees.’’
Amid the attack, Sister Danielle managed to slip away and raise the alarm, and a special contingent of a heavily armed anti-terrorist rapid-reaction force was on the scene within moments.
The team attempted to negotiate with the hostage-takers through a sacristy window and had considered storming the building, but the two men used three hostages as human shields, French public prosecutor Francois Molins said yesterday.
When the two attackers stepped outside the church, police shot them to death. One of them was found to have a false suicide belt covered in aluminum and three knives. The other had a backpack made to look as though it contained a bomb.
An officer recognised one of them, who was identified by French authorities as Adel Kermiche, 19, who twice had attempted to travel to Syria and join Islamic State but was returned to France and arrested.
Fitted with an electronic bracelet and required to check in daily with police, he was allowed to leave his parents’ house for several hours a day and move about close to his home, which was near the church.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the grisly slaying of the beloved Roman Catholic priest, raising urgent new questions about the performance of the French security apparatus, especially while the country was in a state of high alert after recent attacks.
Islamic State described the attack as a rebuke to ‘‘crusader’’ nations – its code for members of the United States-led coalition carrying out air strikes against the militant group. France is among them.
For France, still reeling from the deaths of 84 people in Nice on its most cherished national holiday, the slaying of 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel – a native of Normandy, born a few miles from the 16th-century church where he died – brought a nationwide wave of revulsion and anger. One of the two parishioners, also slashed, was in hospital in a serious condition, officials said.