The church of Saint-Etienne du Rouvray, in which Father Hamel was killed, here July 26, 2020. -

NICOLAS MESSYASZ / SIPA

The anti-terrorism judges in charge of the investigation into the assassination of Father Jacques Hamel in 2016 in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (Seine-Maritime) have completed their investigation, paving the way for a trial of four relatives of the two jihadists killed by the police, we learned Monday from a judicial source.

This decision, taken on Friday, is the prelude to the requisitions of the Paris prosecutor's office and the final decision of the judges on the holding of a trial at the assizes.

The assassination, on July 26, 2016, of this priest in his church, a highly symbolic religious target, had an international impact, twelve days after the terrorist attack in Nice which left 86 dead.

The priest Jacques Hamel, 85, had just finished his morning mass in front of three nuns and a couple of parishioners when he had been killed with two stab wounds in the throat.

Three men in detention

The assassins, who claimed to be Daesh, Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean, 19, both registered S, had been shot dead by the police when they left the church in this small town in the industrial suburb of Rouen.

A parishioner, Guy Coponet, then aged 86, was forced to film the assassination with a phone before being stabbed in turn.

Wounded in the throat, arm and back, however, he survived.

The file on Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray

Since then three men, still detained, have been indicted for "criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise".

The first, Farid K., arrested the day after the attack, is a cousin of Abdel Malik Petitjean.

Investigators are convinced that the 35-year-old man was aware of the planned attack, which he disputes.

A few days later, investigators arrested Yassine S. This young man from the Toulouse suburbs, now 26, had joined the two jihadists in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, but had finally left them without participating in the attack.

A fourth suspect probably dead

In 2018, the judges indicted a third man, Jean-Philippe Steven Jean Louis, 24, who went with Abdel Malik Petitjean to Turkey in June 2016, a few weeks before the attack, probably with the intention to go to Syria.

The latter, however, returned to France while his partner was arrested by the Turkish authorities and then expelled.

Probable instigator of the attack, Rachid Kassim, famous French recruiter of the Islamic State group, is the fourth man involved in this case.

Considered dead today, this jihadist, also accused of having remote-controlled the Magnanville attack and several attack projects in France, is the target of an arrest warrant for "complicity" in the attack.

Justice

Attack foiled at Notre-Dame: Behind the accused, the shadow of jihadist Rachid Kassim

Miscellaneous

Assassination of Father Hamel: The diocese of Rouen wishes to become a civil party

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