Hostage-takers slaughter French priest
PARIS — On a somnolent midsummer weekday, only a devout few had gathered for mid-morning Mass at St. Etienne church in a quiet suburb of Rouen, a medieval French city best known for inspiring dreamlike Monet paintings. For the two men who arrived with knives just before 10 a.m., 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!’ ” she said in an interview with BFM-TV. “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 heavily armed anti-terrorist rapid-reaction force was on the scene within moments.
They attempted to negotiate with the hostagetakers through a sacristy window and had considered storming the building, but the two men used three hostages as human shields, French public prosecutor François Molins said Tuesday. When the two attackers stepped outside of the church, police shot them dead. One of them was found to have a false suicide belt covered in aluminium and three knives. The others had a backpack made to look as if it contained a bomb and a kitchen timer.
An officer recognized one of them, who was identified by French authorities as a young local named Adel Kermiche, 19, who twice had attempted to travel to Syria and join in the fight for 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.
As authorities searched for possible accomplices, they reported one arrest.
The grisly slaying of the beloved Roman Catholic priest was claimed by Islamic State, raising urgent new questions about the performance of the French security apparatus, especially while the country was in a state of high alert in the wake of previous attacks.
The episode also added fuel to an already incendiary debate about Europe’s ability to assimilate immigrants from war-torn countries, and the seeming inability of European governments to stave off attacks inspired by jihadist ideology, regardless of whether they were organized by any particular group.