Jihad in France | Priest killed in church by Islamists: a trial “to understand”

(Paris) Nearly six years after the assassination of Father Hamel in full mass, in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, in Normandy, the victims and their relatives hope that the trial which opened on Monday in Paris will help the “understanding” of this jihadist attack, despite the absence of the main officials and key witnesses.

The two young assassins, Adel Kermiche and Abdel-Malik Petitjean, both 19, who claimed to belong to the Islamic State (IS) group, were killed by the police as they left the small church in the suburbs of Rouen, on July 26, 2016.

Close to the accused, the three men present in the box of the special assize court of Paris, Jean-Philippe Jean Louis, Farid Khelil and Yassine Sebaihia, appear for “terrorist association of criminals” and incur thirty years of criminal imprisonment.

They are suspected of having been aware of their projects, of having shared their ideology or of having tried to join Syria.

The fourth defendant, Rachid Kassim, the alleged instigator of the attack, will be tried in his absence. This French IS propagandist is presumed dead in a bombing in Iraq in February 2017. He is the only one to be indicted for complicity in the assassination of the priest and the attempted assassination of a parishioner, accused of to have “knowingly encouraged and facilitated the passage to the act” of the two jihadists.

“Dodge”

Present Monday at the hearing, Guy Coponet, who attended mass with his wife and had been seriously injured, wished that the trial allow “that it ends in a good way”.

Now 92, he “wants to understand, through the trial, how young people just out of adolescence have come to commit such horrors,” his lawyer, Me Méhana Mouhou, told AFP. .

On the other hand, the three nuns also present at the mass sent a medical certificate attesting that they were not in a condition to come and testify.

“We are waiting for the truth to be told about the lack of means (…) of the public forces to avoid this massacre on my brother’s body,” said one of Father Jacques Hamel’s sisters, Roseline, on Monday.

One of the assassins, Adel Kermiche, was placed under an electronic bracelet at the time of the attack, after an aborted departure for Syria.

The Intelligence Directorate of the Prefecture of Police (D^r PP) from Paris had also been implicated, because, according to an article published in 2018 in the information site Médiapart, its investigators had had access a week before the assassination to messages from the young man on the encrypted Telegram messaging system where he referred to an attack in a church.

But of the five agents of this service cited to testify by a lawyer for the civil parties, four are “not psychologically fit to be heard during the trial”, according to medical certificates cited by the president of the court. The director of intelligence offered to come and testify in their place, saying for some “psychologically broken” by this affair as well as by the attack which occurred in 2019 on the premises of the police headquarters.

“We want to understand” if the attack could have been avoided, insisted M^and Mouhou, fearing “a trial that will not be definitively purged”, while Francis Szpiner, lawyer for several relatives of the murdered priest regretted a “evasion” of the police which risks “fueling a feeling of suspicion”.

“The excuse that is offered, namely that the four police officers mentioned, in charge of intelligence, in charge of the security of the country, would be so affected […] that they could not travel here, frankly it is very difficult to hear for the civil parties, who also experienced the tragedy of an attack”, regretted Christian Saint-Palais, lawyer for Roseline Hamel, to adjournment.

The court will decide later whether or not to ignore their hearing.

The Archbishop of Rouen, Mgr Dominique Lebrun, asked AFP about the responsibility of the three accused “detained for five years”: “Are they guilty? Enough to ? »

For Béranger Tourné, lawyer for Jean-Philippe Jean Louis, the answer is clear: these three defendants are “only three lamp workers […] that we are trying to hang up “artificially to the attack.

They all deny having had any knowledge of the plans for violent action of the two assassins.

The hearing is scheduled to last nearly four weeks.