Police bring down 2 who killed French priest

PARIS: Two attackers seized hostages yesterday in a church near Rouen, Normandy, and killed a priest by slitting his throat before being shot dead by police.

Another person inside the church was seriously injured and is hovering between life and death, Interior Ministry spokesman PierreHenry Brandet said.

Police rescued three people from the church in the small northwestern town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray. The hostage-taking occurred during morning mass. President Francois Hollande said the attackers had pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

In Mogadishu, Somalia, a suicide bomber detonated an explosivesladen car outside the United Nations Mine Action Service offices, killing 10 people, including seven UN guards, a Somali police official said yesterday.

Unlike previous attacks blamed on the al-Qaeda-linked militant group al-Shabab, gunmen did not accompany the suicide bomber, Captain Mohamed Hussein said.

He said that the suicide car bomber tried to speed through the barrier at the UN office but guards shot at the car.

Hussein said a second suicide blast targeted a checkpoint manned by Somali security forces near the city’s African Union base. Casualties there remain unclear.

Al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for the blasts, according to the group’s Andalus radio station. AlShabab is waging an insurgency against Somalia’s weak UN-backed government. Al-Shabab wants to establish an Islamic emirate in the country based on a strict form of Islam.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, police yesterday killed nine suspected Islamist extremists believed to be planning another mass attack following a deadly cafe assault this month, national police chief A.K.M Shahidul Hoque said.

Police who stormed their hideout said the men belonged to a Bangladeshi group blamed for the Dhaka cafe attack in which 20 hostages, mostly foreigners, were killed.

“From police intelligence sources, we learnt that they were planning to carry out a major incident. We conducted the operation to foil any such incident,” said Shahidul.

Police said the men were aged between 20 and 25 and wore the same clothing and backpacks as the group that carried out the cafe attack in the city’s upscale Gulshan neighbourhood. Another suspected extremist was shot and arrested during the raid in the capital’s Kalyanpur neighbourhood.

Hoque said all 10 were suspected members of the homegrown extremist group, Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), which local authorities blamed for the Dhaka cafe attack.

But a police official said one wounded survivor of the raid had said all of those inside the hideout were IS followers.

“His name is Hasan. He said they are IS members,” the police official said on condition of anonymity.

He said the 25-year-old was a cook and came from the northern district of Bogra, home to two of the five cafe attackers.

Bangladeshi authorities have rejected the IS link, saying international jihadist networks have no presence in the world’s third largest Muslim-majority nation.

Hoque said the nine killed had no connection with the IS, even though they were wearing the group’s signature black robes and turbans.

“We have not found any link with IS. They are all local Bangladeshi militants.” Agencies