French officials name 2nd church attacker
PARIS — French officials on Thursday identified the second man responsible for attacking a Catholic church in Normandy as a 19-yearold who was spotted last month in Turkey as he supposedly headed to Syria — but returned to France instead.
The prosecutor’s office identified him as AbdelMalik Nabil Petitjean following DNA tests on his corpse. A security official confirmed that he was the unidentified man pictured in a photo distributed to French police July 22 with a warning that he could be planning an attack.
Four days later, Petitjean and a 19-year-old local man, Adel Kermiche, stormed the church in Saint-Etienne-duRouvray during morning Mass. They held five people hostage — the priest, two nuns and an elderly couple — before fatally slashing the priest’s throat and seriously wounding another man. Police shot to death both attackers as they left the church.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility.
Prosecutors said Petitjean was born in Saint-Diedes-Vosges, eastern France, but most recently lived in the Alpine town of Aix-lesBains where his mother lives. Kermiche was from Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
A youth said to be about 16 who was detained after the attack was still being questioned Thursday, the prosecutor’s office said.
Thursday’s revelations showed that anti-terrorist authorities came close twice to identifying Petitjean as a threat — but couldn’t put his name to his picture as part of two disconnected intelligence tipoffs.
First, according to a French security official, A nun Thursday mourns the Rev. Jacques Hamel, who was killed this week in an attack on a church in France. France received a report from Turkish counterparts that Petitjean was seen passing through a Turkish airport June 10 destined for Syria. France duly placed Petitjean’s name on a long list of French residents who travel to Syria and Iraq, either to fight with Islamic State forces or simply to live among them. The database of citizens considered a potential danger is used to maintain a lookout for militants returning from the war zone.
However, Petitjean never went to Syria but instead returned almost immediately to France, the security official said, and was back inside the country long before his name was added June 29 to France’s watch list. The official was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
While it’s uncertain what caused Petitjean to turn around, in recent months Islamic State propaganda has encouraged Western recruits not to join extremists in the war zones in Syria or Iraq but to remain home and carry out attacks.
Meanwhile, the French anti-terrorism coordinating Petitjean agency UCLAT issued a photo of Petitjean July 22 to police warning that he “could be ready to participate in an attack on national territory.” But the photo warning came without any name of the person depicted.
The UCLAT flier, obtained by The Associated Press, advised police its information came from a trusted source.
It was not clear how the two men who attacked knew each other or when Petitjean traveled to northwest France.
Intelligence officials worked Thursday to try to explain how Petitjean, a young man without a police record, ended up in the Normandy church with Kermiche, while the people of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray paid homage to the Rev. Jacques Hamel at a gathering.
“There will be no silence here or beyond,” Mayor Hubert Wulfranc said of the loss of the town’s 85-yearold priest in an address to hundreds.
Wulfranc called for “words and acts of peace” to serve as examples to the town’s children.