Priest’s killer had boasted of carnage in a church
Attacker used encrypted messaging to give grim warnings of attack with accomplice
ONE of the Isil killers of a priest coldly boasted of his plan to cause “carnage” at a church on a messaging service popular with jihadists in the weeks before the attack, it emerged yesterday.
“You take a knife, you go to a church, you make carnage, bam!” Adel Kermiche said in an audio recording shared with about 200 people on the encrypted Telegram app.
“You cut off two or three heads and it’s good, it’s over,” he said in a grim warning of the brutal murder of 85year-old Father Jacques Hamel at a church in a quiet Normandy town.
Just over an hour before Kermiche and Abdel Malik Nabil Petitjean slit the priest’s throat, before being shot dead by police in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, he sent a final message: “Download what’s going to come, and share it en masse.” Kermiche, who was under house arrest and tagged, had been exchanging messages for months on the service, used by terrorists because it allows them to hide their communications from the security services.
He recounted being mentored by a “Sheikh” he met in prison and said it was too complicated to travel to Syria or Iraq so “might as well attack here”.
The authenticity of the messages, obtained by the French magazine L’Express, was confirmed by a security source.
Islamic State’s affiliated news agency Amaq yesterday released a video purportedly showing Petitjean urging all Muslims to destroy France. In the pre- recorded video, Petitjean addresses President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls directly.
“You will suffer what our brothers and sisters are suffering. We are going to destroy your country,” the man Amaq alleges is Petitjean says in the recording. “Brothers go out with a knife, whatever is needed, attack them, kill them en masse,” he says, calling on Muslims to attack allies of the international coalition forces fighting Islamist militants in Syria.
The government faced more questions over security yesterday after it emerged that four days before the attack, French anti-terrorism officers sent a photograph of Petitjean to all police stations in France. It was accompanied by a note saying a foreign intelligence service had warned he was planning an attack. But it did not give his name as the photograph had not been matched with his security file.
He had been spotted at a Turkish airport on June 10, with another French national, apparently en route to Syria. French security believed he was in Syria, when in fact he had turned back for France on June 11.
Petitjean, who was shot in the face, was identified when police traced his mother, Yasmina Boukkezoula, at their home in Aix-les-Bains, in south-eastern France, and matched DNA. Distraught and disbelieving, she said it was “impossible that I gave birth to the devil”.
Amid a row over the release of Kermiche from prison while awaiting trial for membership of a terror group, a spokesman for the ministry of justice said seven other terrorist suspects in France are under the same type of surveillance, as are six people convicted of terrorist offences.
France is to create a National Guard of 40,000 as part of efforts to step up security in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks, President François Hollande announced yesterday. The force will initially be formed by transferring reservists from other units.