Islamists murder priest at Mass

Two radical Islamists attacked a morning Mass on Tuesday and slit the throat of the 84-year-old French priest there, Fr Jacques Hamel (pictured), in the latest terror attack in France.

One parishioner attending Mass was seriously injured while another worshipper and two nuns – one of whom rushed out to raise the alarm – survived.

Police quickly surrounded the sixteenth-century church in a suburb of the northern city of Rouen and shot dead the attackers as they left by a rear door.

The nun who raised the alarm, who asked not to be named, told Le Figaro website that the attackers “entered brusquely and took over. They spoke in Arabic. I saw a knife. I left just when they started to attack Fr Jacques. I don’t even know if they realised that I was leaving.”

President François Hollande, who grew up in Rouen, and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve rushed to the scene of the crime, the fourth stunning terror attack in France in a year and a half, and only 12 days after the massacre in Nice that claimed 84 lives.

“We are confronted by the group Daesh (Islamic State) that has declared war on us,” Hollande said at the scene. “We must wage this war with all available means, while respecting the law that makes us a democracy. It was Catholics who were hit, but it was all French who are concerned.”  

The Islamic State news agency Amaq said the attackers were two of the group’s “soldiers [who] responded to calls to target countries of the coalition” fighting against it in Iraq and Syria.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in a tweet: “Horror in the face of the barbaric attack on a church … All of France and all Catholics are wounded. We will stand united.”

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said Pope Francis was horrified by the attack. “We are particularly shocked because this horrible violence took place in a church, in which God’s love is announced, with the barbarous killing of a priest and the involvement of the faithful,” he said.

The murder at St Stephen’s church in the suburb of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray was the first on a symbol of France’s traditional Catholicism. As if following a checklist, previous attacks targeted journalists and Jews, music fans and cafe clients, and a crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks.

Rouen’s Archbishop Domini­que Lebrun learned the news of the priest’s death in Krakow, where he was accompanying a group to World Youth Day, and broke off his pilgrimage to return home. “I cry to God, with all people of good will. I dare to invite non-believers to join this cry,” he said. “The only weapons the Catholic Church can take up are prayer and fraternity among peoples.”

His message to the young Catholics he left behind in Krakow was “to not give up in face of violence and to become apostles of the civilisation of love”.

Main houses of worship in large French cities are well guarded, especially for weekly services and main holy days, but the vast majority of the estimated 50,000 churches and chapels around the country are defenceless.

Hollande quickly scheduled a meeting in Paris with Archbishop Lebrun on Tuesday evening and with the leaders of all main faiths in France on Wednesday.

Mohammed Karabila, imam of the local mosque, said he was “appalled by the death of my friend” and offered the prayers of local Muslims “to his family and the Catholic community”.