The Special Assize Court of Paris looks at, from Monday, on the murder of Father Hamel, on July 26, 2016, in a church near Rouen, by two jihadists killed during this attack. The trial will also be that of three men judged for association of terrorist criminal.
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A few meters from the losing step designed to accommodate the trial of the 17-November attacks, must be held in front of the specially composed court, from Monday, February 14, that of another attack. emblematic of the wave of jihadist attacks that sanglade France between 2015 and 2017. This is the trial of the assassination of Father Hamel, in the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (Seine-Maritime), On July 26, 2016, by two Jihadist apprentices, Adel Kermiche and Abdel-Malik Petitjean, both aged 19, killed on the field by the security forces.
Intervened twelve days after the carnage of the English promenade (86 dead and more than 450 wounded) in Nice, this attack horrified well beyond the borders of France. For the first time, a Catholic priest was slaughtered in his place of worship, at the foot of the altar and the Cross, in a staging as barbaric and rudimentary. François Hollande, then President of the Republic, goes on the spot the same day and declares: “Attack a Church, killing a priest, it is to profaze the Republic which guarantees freedom of conscience.”
The Islamic State Organization (EI) for a while has been trying to attack churches, in order to implement its war strategy of religions in the West. From April 2015, Sid-Ahmed Ghlam, who murdered Aurélie Châtelain, had failed in his attack project against a Church of Villejuif (Val-de-Marne). He was sentenced to perpetuity criminal imprisonment. The choice of a Catholic target, intended to trigger retaliation for the Muslims of France in order to push them into the arms of the EI, repeated with the attack aborted to the gas bombings near the Cathedral Notre-Dame From Paris, September 4, 2016, and the knife attack that caused three deaths in the Basilica of Nice, October 29, 2020.
If the scenario desired by the EI of a religion war did not produce, in particular thanks to the mobilization of the Christians and Muslims of the Rouen region on the occasion of the funeral of Father Hamel, the holding The trial, in the full presidential campaign electrified by the emergence of the candidacy and ideas of Eric Zemmour, risks reviving extremist speeches.
A terrorist project formed quickly
In fact, there will be two trials of the Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray attack. The first is that of the attack as such, whose main protagonists are dead, with the exception of Guy Coponet, seriously injured with knife, and four women who have witnessed. This process will be an opportunity to return to the chronology of facts, including the express radicalization of Kermiche and Petitjean, as well as the faster training of their terrorist project.
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