An 85-year-old priest was murdered and one of his parishioners was left in a critical condition after two men stormed a church near Rouen, in Normandy, on Tuesday morning in an attack which was later claimed by the Islamic State group, less than a fortnight after a Bastille Day attack in Nice claimed by the jihadist group which left 84 dead.
This article is updated from earlier reports, notably following an account of the attack given at 9 p.m. local time (CET) Tuesday by Paris public prosecutor Francis Molins.
What we know so far (1 a.m. CET):
The attack on the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, where a morning Mass held by priest Jacques Hamel together with two parishioners and three nuns, began at 9.25 a.m., announced Paris public prosecutor François Molins in a press conference on Tuesday evening. One of the nuns, Sister Danielle, had succeeded in escaping the hostage-taking when the priest, Jacques Hamel was forced to kneel before his throat was cut.
One of the two assailants has been identified by his fingerprints as Adel Kermiche, a 19-year-old who was assigned to house arrest in his parents’ home in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. The second assailant had not been formally identified by Tuesday evening.
Kermiche was wearing an electronic tag that allowed him to leave his parents’ home during weekday mornings. This was a condition of his release from preventive detention in March this year, after he was twice sent back to France and arrested for several attempts to join jihadists in Syria. Molins said he had twice attempted to enter Syria via Turkey using ID documents belonging to his brother and subsequently his cousin. He has no other criminal record.
A Police anti-gang unit, the “BRI”, based in nearby Rouen, was called to the scene on Tuesday morning and led the subsequent operation. Molins said they had tried but failed to negotiate with the two hostage-takers.
- The two men who entered the church had placed hostages in front of the church’s doors to prevent the police storming the building. Police shot the two attackers dead after they had come out of the church shielded by the companion of the injured parishioner and two nuns. Molins said one of the two men was carrying a handgun and shouted “Allahu akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic) while advancing towards the police. The public prosecutor said the two attackers had been carrying a "fake explosive device covered in aluminium foil".
The two attackers initially took priest Jacques Hamel, two parishioners and three nuns hostage after storming a Mass in the church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray shortly before 9.30 a.m. One of the nuns managed to escape at the beginning of the siege which lasted about one hour and which is believed to be the first Islamist attack against a Catholic church in Europe.
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It occurred less than two weeks after the Islamic State group (IS) claimed responsibility for an attack by a Tunisian national in the Riviera city of Nice on July 14th, when Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a delivery driver domiciled in the city, drove a 19-tonne truck at high speed into pedestrians joining evening Bastille Day festivities on the seafront Promenade des Anglais, killing 84 people and injuring more than 300 others.
A third person was arrested on Tuesday morning close to the church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray and is being held for questioning. Public prosecutor François Molins said he was a 17-year-old Algerian-born teenager whose brother was wanted “under an international arrest warrant” for attempting to join jihadists in Iraq or Syria. Several houses, including the home of the parents of Adel Kermiche, in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, a small town about ten kilometres from Rouen, were later searched by police.
One of the nuns managed to escape the scene when the attackers began to assault the priest. The nun, identified as Sister Danielle, told BFM TV that the assailants had demanded everyone present in the Church to group before the alter. “In the church this morning everyone shouted ‘stop, you don’t realise what you are doing’”, she told the French news channel. “They forced him to his knees and he wanted to defend himself and that’s where the drama began.”
The two men also attempted to cut the throat one of the parishioners who they took hostage, a police source said. The victim, who has not been identified and who is believed to be aged 86, is described as in a critical condition in hospital in Rouen.
The investigation was handed to the anti-terrorism department of the Paris public prosecutor's office, headed by François Molins.
French president François Hollande and interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve travelled to the scene at the end of the morning, when Hollande told reporters that the attackers had claimed they were acting in the name of IS. Shortly afterwards, the IS-linked Amaq news agency, said two of the jihadist group’s “soldiers" had carried out the attack.
“The French public must understand that they are threatened but that they are not the only country – Germany is too and others – but that their force lies in their cohesion,” said Hollande.
Sister Danielle said the two men filmed themselves as they performed a service in Arabic. “They recorded themselves,” she said. “They did something like a sermon in front of the alter in Arabic. It’s a horror.”
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“I reacted at the moment when he [editor’s note: one of the assailants] attacked Jacques, when he placed him on his knees and almost made him fall over,” she continued. “I ran away and got out quickly. He was busy cutting his throat. He didn’t see me leave. People shouted.”
Pope Francis, via a statement issued by the Vatican, expressed his shock at the attack. “We are particularly shocked because this horrible violence took place in a church, in which God’s love is announced, with the barbarous killing of a priest and the involvement of the faithful,” the statement read.
President François Hollande spoke by phone to the Pope on Tuesday. A statement by his office said Hollande told the head of the Catholic Church that “when a priest is attacked, it is all of France that has been hurt” and expressed “the chagrin” of the France.
The outrage on Tuesday prompted further attacks on the socialist government by the conservative opposition, which, to the backdrop of presidential and parliamentary elections due next spring, has already launched stinging criticism of security policies following the Bastille Day attack in Nice. The tone of the slanging match between opposition and government over recent weeks contrasts with the relative, if tense, political restraint displayed after the terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November last year.
“The judicial quibbling, the precautions, the pretexts for incomplete action are no longer admissible,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, former French president and now head of the conservative Les Républicains party, speaking on Tuesday. “I call on the government to put in place all the measures that we have presented these last months, without delay,” added Sarkozy, who is expected to soon announce his bid to become the party’s 2017 presidential election candidate in primaries to be held this November.
Sarkozy’s principal rival to become the Républicains party’s presidential runner, former French prime minister Alain Juppé, who mounted sharp attacks on the government after the massacre in Nice, was notably more reserved in his comments on Tuesday, when he denounced “the horror” and “the barbarity” of the attack in Normandy and spoke of his thoughts for the victims.
But Eric Ciotti, a Républicains party Member of Parliament (MP) for Nice and who has been at the centre of attacks on the government’s security policies since the July 14th attack in the city, once again went on the offensive. “France is at war, there must at last be a reaction and the taking of measures, as of today, to better protect the French people,” he said via Twitter. “In the framework of the state of emergency, individuals who are recorded as radicalized must be assigned to house arrest,” he added. “France must immediately expel all radicalized foreigners […] The migratory flows from risk areas must be totally interrupted”.
Meanwhile, far-right Front National party leader Marine Le Pen, targeting both the mainstream Left and Right, said: “The responsibility of all those who govern us since 30 years is immense. To see them chatting away is revolting.” Her party’s vice-president, Florian Philippot, commenting via Twitter, said “Islam has passed a stage in horror, and targets one of the pillars of the millennial identity of our country”.
Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, an MP for the Front National which adopts a high-profile anti-Muslim and anti immigration stance, launched what might be interpreted as a call to arms. “They kill our children, murder our police officers, and cut the throat of our priests. Wake up!” she declared, later adding that “in the West as in the East, Christians must rise up to resist Islamism”.
In a televised address on Tuesday evening, President François Hollande brushed aside the opposition calls for measures that violated France’s constitution, insisting that “to restrain freedoms would in all certainty weaken the cohesion of our nation”. He said that France would defeat terrorism by “standing together”.
Interviewed on French television on Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the aim of the attack in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray “by attacking a priest, attacking the Catholic Church” was to “pitch the French against each other” and prompt “a war of religions”.
“Our response is democracy. It is also the force of our diversity that must be mounted in opposition, but without the least complacency,” Valls added.
The Associated Press (AP) agency said it was told by the French Bishops’ Conference that the murdered priest, Jacques Hamel, was aged 85, contradicting statements made by other organizations.
It said “Genevieve Szerauc” confirmed to AP “that records prove” that Father Jacques was born on November 30th, 1930 in Darnetal, a small town east of Rouen.
He was ordained on June 30th 1958, said Szerauc, and had served the parish of Saint-Etienne-de-Rouvray since 2005. He was retired since ten years ago, but continued to offer his services to the local parish and that in the neighbouring town of Elbeuf.
The regular priest of Saint-Etienne-de-Rouvray, Father Auguste Moanda-Phuati, said he “could not possibly imagine” the possibility of the events of Tuesday.
Hamel was described by numerous locals as a modest man, appreciated by many. “He was old, but always available for everyone,” a resident of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray told French weekly magazine L’Express. “He was a good priest. He had been here for many years, he lived in the rectory here. Many parishioners knew him very well.”
The head of the local Muslim regional council for Upper Normandy, Imam Mohamed Karabila, told French press agency AFP on Tuesday he was “appalled” by the death of his “friend”, Father Jacques Hamel. “He was somebody who gave his life for others,” said Karabila, who is in charge of the mosque at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, which is built on land that was offered for the purpose by the local Catholic Church. “We are dumbfounded at the mosque,” he added.
Both Karabila and Hamel were part of a multi-faith committee that regularly met in the region for the past 18 months. “We discussed religion and knowing how to live together,” said Karabila.
The mosque in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray previously held a tribute to Imad Bin Ziaten, a 30-year-old French parachutist who came from the nearby commune of Sotteville-lès-Rouen and who was one of the victims in March 2012 of Toulouse Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah, who killed seven people in a jihadist rampage. “It is a total shock,” said the soldier’s mother, Latifa Ibn Ziaten, of the events on Tuesday. “It awakens the pain.”
“There are lots of families who come to see me about their children who radicalise themselves,” she told AFP, although she described Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray as a “peaceful” town. “When I see a danger, I try to flag it.”
- This report was last updated at 2.20 a.m. local time (CET).