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Killer of Priest in France Was Detained for Twice Trying to Enter Syria French Ask Why Attacker, Known as a Terrorist Threat, Was Left Free to Kill Priest
(about 9 hours later)
PARIS — One of the two young men who killed an 85-year-old Catholic priest in a town in Normandy on Tuesday had been detained for nearly 10 months after twice trying to travel to Syria, but he was released in March over the objection of prosecutors, according to French officials. PARIS — The question troubling France on Wednesday in the wake of the attack by a teenager who aspired to go to Syria, but settled instead for cutting the throat of a priest, is whether the crime was a result of failures by the French government, and what more could have been done to prevent it.
The young man, Adel Kermiche, 19, was born in Mont-St.-Aignan, a town about five miles from St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, where he killed the priest, the Rev. Jacques Hamel, at the end of morning Mass. Mr. Kermiche and the other attacker, who has not been identified, were shot dead by the police. Five other people — three nuns and two parishioners — were held hostage at the church; one of the nuns escaped, but one of the parishioners, an 86-year-old man, was critically injured. The Islamic State called the attackers “soldiers.” Shock from the attack did not stifle new political accusations, with questions immediately raised about how a perpetrator well known to the authorities was nonetheless left free to kill.
The news that Mr. Kermiche was known to the authorities was announced Tuesday evening by François Molins, the Paris prosecutor, who oversees terrorism investigations. It immediately raised new concerns about the government’s ability to prevent radicalized young people from traveling to Syria and committing acts of terrorism. For politicians and much of the public, it was hard to ignore that the crime was committed during a state of emergency that already gives the government added powers to constrain potential terrorists, and that one of the perpetrators was essentially on probation and wearing an electronic bracelet at the time of the attack.
On Wednesday, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president who is expected to be a candidate in the 2017 presidential elections, seized on the news to criticize President François Hollande’s government for not doing more to protect the country. Similar questions and concerns were raised in June, when a man who had served time in prison for having links to terrorist networks and was known to the security services stabbed to death a police officer and his companion in Magnanville, near Paris.
“All this violence and barbarism has paralyzed the French left since January 2015,” Mr. Sarkozy told the newspaper Le Monde. “It has lost its bearings and is clinging to a mind-set that is out of touch with reality.” The attack on Tuesday, coming less than two weeks after the July 14 Bastille Day massacre in Nice where 84 people were killed by a Tunisian truck driver, has only added to the country’s anxiety.
Mr. Sarkozy has called for the detention or electronic monitoring of those suspected of being Islamist militants, even if they have committed no crime. France is officially secular but Catholicism is deeply embedded in the country’s culture. That has made the shock and symbolism of the killing of father Jacques Hamel all the greater.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve rejected Mr. Sarkozy’s proposal, saying that jailing people without convictions would be not only unconstitutional but also ineffective. A Mass at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, reserved for the most solemn state occasions, was held Wednesday evening in memory of Father Hamel, 85, whose attackers forced him to kneel before killing him in the old stone church of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy. Much of the government and two of France’s three living former presidents attendanded.
“This would be utterly inefficient, and I will tell you why,” he told the Europe 1 radio station on Monday. At the same time a new feeling of helplessness was setting in. One of the attackers, Adel Kermiche, 19, had tried twice to go to Syria. On Wednesday, the Islamic State released a video that it said was recorded before the attack by him and his accomplice in which they pledged allegiance to the group.
Covert surveillance “allows intelligence agencies to act without these individuals knowing it, to dismantle networks and neutralize these individuals after we have brought them to court,” he said. Mr. Kermiche, like the Nice attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, had a documented history of psychiatric troubles, according to the newspaper Le Monde, which leaked his judicial files in Wednesday’s editions and whose report was confirmed by the Paris prosecutor’s office, which leads terrorism investigations.
The French Parliament recently adopted a law that would give prosecutors powers that are normally reserved for investigative judges. The law has not yet taken effect, but Mr. Cazeneuve said it would be a big step to improve public safety. But unlike Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel, Mr. Kermiche was also already in the government’s books as a terrorist threat.
Mr. Hollande, who spoke with Pope Francis after the attack on Tuesday, met on Wednesday with leaders of many of France’s religious communities, including Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist clergy members. Indeed, barely four months ago a judge released him from detention, convinced by the young Franco-Algerian’s arguments that he was ready for a normal life and no longer wanted to become a jihadist.
“We cannot let ourselves get dragged into the hands of Daesh and its political schemings, which aim to pit children of the same family against each other,” said Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, the archbishop of Paris, after the meeting at the Élysée Palace. The cardinal was using an Arabic term for the Islamic State. “The moment of truth we’re now living is about knowing which God we believe in,” he added. “Do we believe in a God of death or a God of life?” At the time, the Paris terrorism prosecutor’s office appealed the judge’s decision, arguing that Mr. Kermiche should stay behind bars.
Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris and a former president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, called the attack a “blasphemy which goes against the teachings of our religion.” The prosecutor was contemptuous of the judge’s arguments for limited surveillance, calling them “perfectly illusory, given the context,” according to the documents quoted in Le Monde. “He’s claiming a mistake, and arguing for a second chance. But there’s a very big risk.”
The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has warned that the Islamic State’s goal is to “set the French people against each other, attack religion in order to start a war of religions,” and he appealed to the French people not to fall into the terrorist group’s trap. Once before, in 2015, after his first failed effort to go to Syria, Mr. Kermiche had been allowed to go free but was required to check in with the police and probation authorities. He violated that order within about six weeks trying a second time to go to Syria. This time he made it as far as Turkey where authorities arrested him.
As the investigation into the church attack continued, details that have emerged of Mr. Kermiche’s life depict a man who desperately wanted to get to Syria. When he was caught the second time, he was put in preventive detention until March 18 of this year when he came before the judge who ultimately let him go.
On March 23, 2015, a relative reported that he had disappeared. The same day, German authorities detained him as he tried to use identification papers belonging to his brother to travel to Syria. The next day, he was returned to France and placed under detention. On March 28, 2015, he was charged with attempting a criminal act and placed under judicial supervision. He was ordered not to leave the Seine-Maritime department, where he is from, and was required to report once a week to his local police station. This time he was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet, forbidden to leave his local department of Seine-Maritime and made to report to a probation officer at the police station once a week, and ordered to live in his parent’s house, where he was allowed to leave only between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m on weekdays.
Mr. Kermiche was not deterred, however, from his goal of becoming a jihadist. Just over a month later, he left home. An international arrest warrant was issued for him, and on May 13, 2015, he was arrested after flying to Turkey from Geneva — this time using his cousin’s national identity card. The Turkish authorities sent him back to Switzerland, and on May 22, 2015, the Swiss authorities sent him back to France. All those measures proved useless. It was at about 9:25 a.m. on Tuesday — within his judge-allotted period of free circulation — that Mr. Kermiche and an accomplice burst into the church armed with knives and killed Father Hamel and gravely wounded one of his parishioners.
There he faced new charges for violating judicial orders by trying to go to Syria. He was detained until March 18 of this year, when a counterterrorism judge allowed him to go home, but under house arrest, with electronic monitoring. He was permitted to leave his house from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends and holidays. The authorities confiscated his national identity card and his passport. The probation officers who monitor him have had little training in terrorism cases and are overworked and overwhelmed, said Sarah Silva Descas, secretary general of the branch of the C.G.T. union that represents probation and parole officers. Most of their cases involve common criminals not would-be terrorists.
The Paris prosecutor’s office appealed the decision to let Mr. Kermiche go home, but on March 25, an appellate court upheld the judge’s decision to release him under house arrest. “There’s enormous pressure on our personnel, we are not prepared to deal with this,” she said.
Separately, a 16-year-old native of Algeria was arrested in St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray at 11:40 a.m. on Wednesday, Mr. Molins said. The teenager is the younger brother of another man who is wanted by the authorities for having used Mr. Kermiche’s identity card on March 20, 2015, to leave France, headed for Iraq or Syria. Probation and parole officers, Ms. Silva Descas said, are trained to help reinsert people in the community, find a job and get medical treatment if they have physical or psychiatric problems or problems with drug use.
Mr. Kermiche’s persistence — despite repeatedly being stopped in his efforts to go to Syria and having spent almost a year in preventive detention before being released, and then only with elaborate conditions put on him — suggests that he was at the very least heeding the Islamic State’s call, which Mr. Molins described as: “Strike at any moment and any place, in all circumstances.” Yet in terrorism cases they are being asked to function as if they were intelligence workers, alert for signs of potential radicalization.
“That is the criminal and fanatic propaganda of the criminal organization of Daesh,” Mr. Molins added, “which takes over the minds of individuals of varying profiles and backgrounds in a terrifying way.” A colleague of hers, who was assigned to follow Mr. Kermiche told Ms. Silva Descas that “there had not been a failure.”
“She had checked in with him every week,” Ms. Silva Descas said. “She had followed his pursuit of a profession. He had come to all of his meetings.
“Perhaps she blames herself, but she should not. One can do many things but zero risk does not exist,” she added.
The electronic bracelet did not include a GPS satellite locator, as is often used for sex offenders, but only indicated whether Mr. Kermiche was at his house when he was supposed to be.
Since Mr. Kermiche committed the crime during the hours he was permitted to be away from his home for work, the bracelet would not have detected anything amiss, Ms. Silva Descas said.
The second attacker has yet to be formally identified, but several French news outlets have said that he did not have a criminal record, nor were his fingerprints or DNA on file, slowing the security forces’ efforts to identify him. The person whose identity appears to match most closely was also 19 years old, the same age as Mr. Kermiche, but unlike him, the second man came from eastern France.
The government on Wednesday pushed back against demands that it tighten its security stance, arguing as it often does that France’s precious liberties can’t be sacrificed in the name of security.
“We can’t give up on the rule of law in order to protect the rule of law,” Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve insisted to reporters outside the presidential Élysée Palace on Wednesday morning.
“If we give up on that, on constitutional principles, on republican principles,” he added, “then we will have consecrated the victory of the terrorists.”
But it is far from clear that the government is winning with its arguments for civil liberties. The pace of attacks appears to be increasing, while the government’s popularity continues to drop.
“The freeing up of a young man who has been imprisoned, that’s conceivable. But you’ve got to take the strictest possible control measures,” said Georges Fenech, an opposition member of Parliament who chaired a recent intelligence-apparatus review committee.
Mr. Kermiche “had a window of several hours, in which he could pass into action,” Mr. Fenech said. “I would have preferred him to be under permanent monitoring.”
Mr. Fenech has called for a “French Guantánamo” for those returning from Syria. He said in an interview on Wednesday that when Parliament returns after its summer recess, “we’re going to go much further.”
Mr. Fenech will introduce laws criminalizing “behavior” that indicates radicalization, as well internment centers for those on the government’s suspected terrorism lists, potentially involving thousands of people.
This idea is turning up increasingly on the legislative wish-lists of the right-leaning parties. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy, a leading contender in next year’s race, proposed something very similar in an interview in Le Monde on Wednesday.
“The government has got to answer the question: How is it that known individuals, one whom is under judicial surveillance for having tried to join jihad in Syria, were allowed the freedom to commit such an attack?” Mr. Sarkozy asked.