Questions over how Isil killers escaped police
Outrage in France as it emerges that attackers were known to police but were free to murder
THE French government faced mounting questions yesterday over how two teenage Islamists under police surveillance were able to burst into a church and murder a priest during mass.
Police were monitoring one of the youths, a French convert named as 19-year-old Abdel Malik P, but lost track of him in the days before the attack and were hunting him in fear he would carry out an attack.
The other, Adel Kermiche, also 19, was tagged and under house arrest at his parents’ home in the small Normandy town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, less than two miles from the church.
Islamic State of Iraq and the Le- vant released a video in which the pair held hands as they swore “obedience” to the terror group.
Abdel Malik held a black banner as French-born Kermiche, of Algerian origin, stumbled through a pledge of allegiance in Arabic. He had been under house arrest while awaiting trial for membership of a terrorist organisation. He spent 10 months in detention after being arrested trying to travel to Syria. Kermiche was released in March, despite an appeal by prosecutors who argued that he was too dangerous to leave prison.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president, joined other opposition figures in demanding a tougher approach by the Socialist government.
FRENCH police are investigating how two 19-year-olds known to have been radicalised, one of whom was tagged and under house arrest, were able to murder a priest at the altar as he led mass.
The pair were seen pledging allegiance to Isil in a chilling video released by the terrorist group yesterday.
Abdel Malik P, a French 19-year-old convert to Islam, was identified as the second attacker who seized hostages at the church with Adel Kermiche, also 19.
They slit Father Jacques Hamel’s throat and forced a parishioner to film the death throes of the 85-year-old at his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, in Normandy.
Both teens were known to the police for having links to Islamist extremism. Police had been looking for Abdel Malik P for several days before the attack because they had lost track of his whereabouts, it emerged yesterday.
Kermiche was tagged after being released from detention in March while awaiting trial for membership of a terror group. He remained under house arrest at his parent’s home in the small town but was allowed out for four hours a day. It was during that time that the attack took place.
Police found Abdel Malik P’s identity card while searching the Kermiche family home. Investigators also searched the flat of his mother in Aixles-Bains, a town in the south-eastern Savoie region where he was known to be living – 800 kilometres from Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray. It is not known how the killers knew each other.
Both were shot dead by police as they left the church, forcing hostages to go ahead of them as human shields. Abdel Malik P was shot in the face, which slowed down identification. Police did not release his surname.
One of the hostages at the church, an 86-year-old woman, yesterday said the attackers had handed her husband Guy a mobile phone and demanded that he take photos or video of the priest after he was killed. Her husband was then slashed by the attackers and is now hospitalised with serious injuries. The woman, identified only as Jeanine, told RMC radio that her husband dead to stay alive.
Mohammed Karabila, a local Muslim leader, expressed horror that the security services had failed to prevent the attack: “How could a person wearing an electronic tag carry out an attack? Where were the police?”
The former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, called for more known Islamists to be detained amid an escalating row over alleged security failings in the hours before the massacre of 84 people in Nice on July 14. “We must change the law to preserve a state of law,” he said.
Kermiche was once a sports-mad teenager who loved The Simpsons and pop singer Rihanna. A childhood friend named as Christian said he had once wanted to be a model and loved to “flirt with the ladies”.
Other friends claimed that he pretended to marry at least three Muslim girls for sex, only to abandon them days later. He reportedly had four siblings, one of whom is a doctor. The family was not religious but he was “bewitched” by radicals after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in January last year.
A recent psychological report on Kermiche highlighted his frail mental state, detailing depression and other problems. Prosecutors appealed against his release but he convinced a judge to free him, saying: “I am a Muslim grounded in the values of mercy and goodness – I am not an extremist.”
Frédéric Lagache of the police union Alliance described the judge’s decision as “incomprehensible”.
“We must change the law, he said. “Judges must not be allowed to set someone like that free.”