• France A priest with his throat slit and a hostage in critical condition in an IS attack on a church in Normandy

It was a summer morning.

That July 26 six years ago, the priest

Jacques Hamel,

86 years old, 60 of them as a priest, addressed his faithful from the church of Saint-Étienne du Rouvray, a small town in Normandy.

Shortly before the end of the sermon, two assailants broke into the church, took five hostages, forced one of them to record everything, and then killed Jacques, slitting his throat.

During the assault, one of the hostages managed to escape to notify the police.

Minutes later, the two terrorists, who claimed to belong to the Islamic State, were killed by the French Intervention Brigade (BRI).

This Monday the trial for the murder of Hamel begins in Paris, which was the first IS attack against a priest and which, perhaps because of its symbolism and macabre, crossed all borders.

"It was the first time in two centuries that a priest was killed in France during a mass,

and the first IS attack on a European church," recalls lawyer Eric Morain, from the National Federation of Victims of Attacks, in a post on social media today. For Morain, the objective of the attack was "load it with as many symbols as possible to make it even more terrifying and inscribe it in memory". Hamel's murder also took place at a particularly difficult time for France, hit hard by Islamic terrorism in 2016 and only two weeks after the Nice attack, in which 86 people died. .

With the two authors dead, the trial is marked by the absence of the alleged instigator, Rachid Kassim, allegedly killed in a bombing in Iraq in February 2017. So that from this Monday and during the four weeks that the process will last, they feel three defendants on the bench: Jean-Philippe Steven Jean-Louis, whom the judges suspect of having "advised" one of the assailants, Farid K., accused of having supported the project, and Yassin S., who joined the two terrorists the day before the attack and who would have helped to locate the place.

However, despite the impossibility of bringing those responsible to justice, the victims (several of the hostages were injured) and their families - as well as a large part of the community of this quiet city - hope that the trial will

shed light on what happened that day

in 2016. Among them are Roseline and Chantal, sisters of the priest who want to know why they obeyed a "man of peace" and why the police prevention system failed, since one of the attackers, booked by the police , should have been wearing an electronic bracelet at the time of the attack, for having tried to travel to Syria.

Guy Coponet also closely follows this process.

He is 92 years old and is the man whom the terrorists forced to film the beheading of the parish priest Hamel;

he played dead to save himself, after receiving several stab wounds from the attackers.

Coponet hopes that "those who are responsible ask for forgiveness," he told Agence France Presse.

A few months ago, at the anniversary ceremony of the attack, he confessed to the

Paris Normandie

newspaper that

he had not forgotten the parents of the two young Islamists:

"Their parents and siblings share the same pain as Father Hamel's family."

The Saint-Etienne Church today houses two traces of its history.

On one side, a plaque recalling the attack and mentioning the Declaration of Human Rights.

From another, a painting hung on the walls of the temple, a portrait of Father Hamel, with a halo.

A Muslim artist, Moubine,

shocked by the attack, gave it to the parish.

"The first day I went up to the altar, where they killed him, I felt a great emotion. It was an attack on all the priests," recently recounted the priest Jacques Simon, appointed last September as a substitute for Hamel, whose beatification process is still his course in the Vatican.


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