What happened in 2016?
Child of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Adel Kermiche held a chain there in which he explicitly called for murder: “You take a knife, you go to a church, you cause carnage, even you cut off two or three heads, c It’s good, it’s over,” he wrote to his jihad comrades on July 19, 2016, a week before the attack. As the attack prepares, the other members of the jihadosphere are not stingy with advice and encouragement: “May God make it easy for you”, wrote one of them to Abdel-Malik Petitjean before adding: “This work , you do it for Allah”.
The passage to the act will be done in a few days, in a terrifying amateurism. On the night of July 21, Abdel-Malik Petitjean contacted Adel Kermiche on Telegram. On the 23rd, he left Savoy by carpooling to join him in Normandy. On the 24th, their plan is ready, and their Daesh allegiance video recorded. The two terrorists want to strike on the 25th but… the church is closed.
They will return on the 26th, to kill the 85-year-old priest Hamel, force an 87-year-old parishioner to film the murder, and die under the bullets of the police. Before expiring, Jacques Hamel addressed his killers: “Go away, demon”, he whispered to them.
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Who are the defendants?
The two perpetrators of the murder of Father Hamel in his church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Adel Kermiche and Abdel-Malik Petitjean, were shot by police shortly after the attack. In their absence, the special assize court of Paris has been judging since February 14 three members of their family or telephone entourage for “terrorist association of criminals”.
The presumed instigator of the attack, the Frenchman Rachid Kassim, is the only defendant prosecuted for “complicity” in the assassination. He is presumed dead in Iraq in 2017 and is therefore being tried posthumously. Jean-Philippe Jean-Louis, Farid Khelil and Yassine Sebaihia are expelled for “terrorist association of criminals”. The three defendants are suspected of having been aware of the projects of the two young men, of having shared their ideology or of having tried to reach Syria.
A sort of “mediator” of the jihadosphere on the internet, Jean-Philippe Jean-Louis hosted a Telegram channel and Facebook groups where he relayed the propaganda of Daesh, whose ranks he sought to join in January 2015.
Farid Khelil36-year-old from Nancy, is suspected of radicalization alongside his cousin Abdel-Malik Petitjean, whom he seemed to consider as a kind of model. He would have had fun with the attack in Nice on July 14, 2016, and he too would have been ready to take violent action, if we are to believe some of his messages.
Visibly interested in violent jihad, Yassine Sebaihia took the road to Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in BlaBlaCar the day before the attack, to join Adel Kermiche there who wanted to set up a kind of “katibat”, an armed group.
At last, Rachid Kassim is the gray eminence who would have piloted everything from the Iraqi-Syrian zone. Born in January 1987 in Roanne (Loire), Rachid Kassim encouraged the two terrorists of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in their plan of violent action.
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What are the penalties against them?
On Tuesday, the two general attorneys demanded “life imprisonment with a 22-year security sentence” against the French propagandist of the Islamic State (IS) organization. Rachid Kassimcalling him the “indisputable instigator” of the July 26, 2016 attack.
Saliha Hand-Ouali and Marine Valentin also claimed “14 years of criminal imprisonment, accompanied by a two-thirds security period” against Jean-Philippe Jean-Louisthe youngest of the defendants (25 years old), for having been the “spokesman of the deadly ideology” of the IS on Telegram, having been a “facilitator of departures to Syria” and having himself tried to go there with Abdel-Malik Petitjean.
The prosecution then requested “nine years’ imprisonment with a two-thirds security sentence” for Farid Khelil, 36, cousin of Abdel-Malik Petitjean. “He himself was ideologically committed and he bears an overwhelming responsibility in the jihadist journey of his cousin, whom he galvanized,” said Saliha Hand-Ouali.
A lighter sentence of “seven years’ imprisonment” has been requested for Yassine Sebaihia27, seen as “the apprentice jihadist, not mature enough to take action himself, but in total adherence”.
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