Two attackers slit priest’s throat in French church
paris — Two attackers seized hostages on Tuesday in a church near the Normandy city of Rouen, killing a priest by slitting his throat before being shot and killed by police, French officials said.
Another person inside the church was seriously injured and is hovering between life and death, Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said.
Police managed to rescue three people from the church in the small northwestern town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, Brandet said. The hostage-taking occurred during morning Mass, he told reporters.
The identities of the attackers and motive for the attack are unclear, according to a security official, who was not authorised to be publicly named.
Tuesday’s slaying inside a church “is obviously a drama for the Catholic community, for the Christian community,” Brandet said.
President Francois Hollande vowed on Tuesday to wage war against Daesh “by every means” within the law after two men linked to the terrorist group killed a priest in a French church.
“We are confronted with a group, Daesh, which has declared war on us,” Hollande said.
“We have to wage war, by every means, (but through) upholding the law, which is because we are a democracy.”
Brandet, speaking on BFM TV, said the RAID special intervention force was searching the church and its perimeter for possible explosives and terrorism investigators had been summoned.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls expressed his horror at what he called “a barbaric attack on a church”.
“The whole of France and all Catholics are wounded. We will stand together,” he wrote on Twitter.
Pope Francis voiced his “pain and horror” at the hostage-taking, according to the Vatican.
The archbishop of Rouen, Dominique Lebrun, urged all non-believers to join those of the church in “calling to God”.
“The Catholic Church can take up no other weapons that prayer and fraternity between men,” he said in a statement.
France is currently on high alert after an attack in Nice on Bastille Day — July 14 — that killed 84 people and a string of deadly attacks last year claimed by the Daesh group that killed 147 others. France is also under a state of emergency and has extra police presence in the wake of the Nice attack in which a man barrelled his truck down the city’s famed Promenade des Anglais, mowing down holiday crowds.
Daesh terrorists have urged followers to attack French churches and the group is believed to have planned at least one church attack earlier.
In April 2015, an Algerian student who was arrested after shooting himself in the leg was found with heavy weapons, bulletproof vests and documents linked to Daesh. He is charged with killing a young woman inside her car the same day.
According to French authorities, the suspect, Sid Ahmed Ghlam, was sent by the Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud to attack a church in Villejuif, just outside of Paris. —