(AFP) The alleged accomplices in the 2016 murder of an 85-year-old French priest appeared in the dock in Paris on Monday after years of investigation into an attack that shocked a country already reeling from a spate of jihadist assaults.
Father Jacques Hamel had his throat slit at the foot of the altar on July 26, 2016, at his small church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, a working-class suburb of Rouen in northwest France.
The two 19-year-old assailants, Adel Kermiche and Abdel-Malik Petitjean, also seriously injured a worshipper after bursting in during mass and taking hostages before being shot and killed by police as they tried to leave the church.
They claimed in a video to be members of the Islamic State group, which later called them its “soldiers” retaliating for France’s fight against jihadists in Syria and Iraq.
