Priest’s killer duped judge: I am not an extremist
Anger has mounted over the murder of a French priest after it emerged that one of the killers had duped a judge into believing he had abandoned radical Islam, and that the second jihadist was also a known terrorism suspect.
Isis released a video yesterday of the two killers pledging allegiance to the group.
French President Francois Hollande has come under further pressure to toughen anti-terrorism measures in response to the death of Father Jacques Hamel, 85, who was forced to kneel at the altar of his church in Saint-Etienne-duRouvray, near Rouen, before the two jihadists cut his throat.
The latest act of Islamist barbarity provoked fresh revulsion in a country still reeling from the Bastille Day attack in Nice in which 84 people died, and the November shootings which left 130 dead in Paris.
An 87-year-old parishioner, one of only five worshippers who was in the church for morning mass at the time of the attack, is being treated for stab wounds. His 86-year-old wife, who was also present, said he had been forced to film the priest’s body on a mobile phone belonging to the killers.
She said Hamel was stabbed with a knife and ‘‘fell face upwards, towards us. We saw the blood running from his mouth. They stabbed him twice more and it was over.
‘‘Then they took my husband hostage and did the same thing to him.’’
She said her husband, who was 87 on the day of the attack, was stabbed four times in the neck, arm and back, and pretended to be dead to avoid further injury.
‘‘He tried to keep his fingers over the wound so that it wouldn’t bleed too much.’’
She said one of the terrorists told her and the three remaining churchgoers – all of them nuns – that they would not be hurt ‘‘because we are going to be used as hostages. We said to ourselves, ‘Well, we’re not going to die straight away’.’’
After seeing the death of Hamel and the wounding of her husband she was less certain. ‘‘I said to myself, ‘It’s going to be our turn.’ The terrorists were holding me from behind with their revolver in my neck.’’ Police said later that the gun was a fake.
One of the terrorists was named as Adel Kermiche, 19, who was released from custody in March despite having made two attempts to join Isis in Syria.
He told a judge that he wanted to settle down and get a job. ‘‘I am a Muslim based on the values of mercy and goodwill. I am not an extremist,’’ he said at the time. ‘‘I want to take up my life again, see my friends and get married.’’
Kermiche’s parents thought he should remain in prison, but the judge ordered his release on the grounds he had been suicidal and had seen the error of his ways.
Marc Trevidic, the investigating magistrate who oversaw Kermiche’s case, said he was ‘‘typical of the person who wants to leave [for Syria] at any cost but who is stopped, so he takes his revenge by joining the jihad in France’’.
Youths in Saint-Etienne-duRouvray, where Kermiche lived with his parents, said he had often talked about his determination to commit an act of terror, citing churches as a target.
He was one of 13 convicted or suspected Islamists given an electronic tag, but the device was turned off between 8.30am and 12.30pm on weekdays to allow him to go out of the house. The church attack occurred at 9.25am.
Court documents show that Kermiche had a troubled past, spending time in hospital with psychiatric problems as a child.
Police believed the second killer to be Abdel Malik Petitjean, 19, from Aix-les-Bains in the Savoy region, eastern France. He, too, was reported to have been identified as a potential terrorist by intelligence services after trying to reach Syria.
Hollande is under pressure to authorise the detention of terrorism suspects in Guantanamo-style camps. His opponents say his failure to authorise extrajudicial proceedings in terrorism cases is leaving France defenceless.
Hollande, eager to maintain a veneer of national unity, attended a ceremony at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris in memory of Hamel yesterday.
Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, accused him of weakness in the fight against terrorists, who she said were likely to commit ‘‘serial attacks’’ over the northern summer.
‘‘The fact that it is the holidays is also in the minds of those seeking to impose terror and to impose the feeling that nobody is safe anywhere.’’