PARIS (AP) — Officials on Thursday identified the second man who attacked a Normandy church during a morning Mass this week, saying he is a 19-year-old from eastern France who was spotted last month in Turkey as he supposedly headed to Syria — but who returned to France instead.
The prosecutor’s office identified him as Abdel-Malik Nabil Petitjean following DNA tests. A security official confirmed that he was the unidentified man pictured on a photo distributed to police four days earlier with a warning that he could be planning an attack.
Petitjean and another 19-year-old, Adel Kermiche, were killed by police as they left the church Tuesday in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray after having fatally slashed the throat of the elderly priest. An elderly man among the five people in the congregation was also seriously wounded.
The attack was claimed by the Islamic State group, which released a video Wednesday allegedly showing Kermiche and his accomplice clasping hands and pledging allegiance to the group.
Petitjean was born in eastern France, in Saint-Die-des-Vosges, but recently lived in Aix-les-Bains, where his mother lives, the prosecutor’s office said. Kermiche was from Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
A man detained after the attack was still being held for questioning, the prosecutor’s office said.
A security official said Turkey spotted Petitjean at an airport going to Syria on June 10, and that on June 29 he was signaled to France and immediately put on a special watch list.
“But he didn’t go to Syria,” said the official who was not authorized to discuss the case and asked not to be identified by name. “He turned around” and returned to France on June 11.
That information was gleaned as police and intelligence officials tried to track back to learn the identity of the second attacker.
The agency that coordinates the anti-terrorist fight, UCLAT, issued the photo of a man on July 22, warning police that this person — without a name but who turned out to be Petitjean — “could be ready to participate in an attack on national territory.”
The UCLAT flyer to law enforcement, obtained by The Associated Press, told police its information came from a trusted source.
It said the person in the photo “could already be present in France and act alone or with other individuals. The date, the target and the modus operandi of these actions are for the moment unknown.”
It was not immediately clear how the two men knew each other or when Petitjean traveled from eastern France to Normandy, in the west.
The church attack came less than two weeks after an attack by a man barreling his truck down a pedestrian zone in Nice, on the Riviera, that killed 84 people celebrating France’s national day.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for that attack, too, as well as two attacks that followed in Germany.
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4 attacks in 7 days. The attacks are increasing. Many of the attacks are by 2nd generation muslim immigrants. Why is that important? The fallacy of “assimilation” is the fiction that this immigration blather is driven by. Assimilation for the muslim immigrants did not work, and does not work. It’s been clear that France has a huge problem with it’s muslim underclass for 40 years, where they all live in ring slums around the outside of large cities - desirable housing is in the cities, slums are the suburbs oddly enough. Belgium has this problem, France has this problem. In Germany, the migrants are continuing to cause problems. The murderous ideology of ISIS and fundamentalist Islam lunacy has infected many in a number of EU countries. And THAT is why PEGIDA, FN, AfD, and other nationalist groups are ascendant.
Assimilation is a two way street. The government also has a duty to provide opportunities for everyone - including its legal immigrant population, rather than sticking them in outer slums and using them as a cheap source of labor.
I firmly believe that if you give young people an opportunity and a fair shake, you reduce the chance they’ll be attracted to Isis’s murderous ideology.
That being said, there is NO excuse for violence or terroristic acts.
Yeah, like the guy in Nice, who was a truck driver. He had a job. That’s an opportunity, and he killed and wounded hundreds.
The numbers of those who have assimilated and NOT become extremists or carried out attacks undermines your argument.
Really? And how many is that? You left of “yet”. Because there are many planning attacks now. We just don’t know who they are. If you believe that this is over, you are a fool. For many who are living lives of unsatisfying drudgery, the notion of the caliphate, the sacrifice to the larger “good” of the Islamic state, is very attractive.