A few meters from the salle des pas perdus set up to accommodate the trial of the November 13 attacks must be held, before the specially composed assize court, from Monday February 14, that of another emblematic attack of the wave jihadist attacks that bloodied France between 2015 and 2017. This is the trial of the assassination of Father Hamel, in the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (Seine-Maritime), July 26, 2016 , by two jihadist apprentices, Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean, both aged 19, killed on the spot by the security forces.
Twelve days after the carnage on the Promenade des Anglais (86 dead and more than 450 injured) in Nice, this attack horrified far beyond the borders of France. For the first time, a Catholic priest had his throat cut in his place of worship, at the foot of the altar and the cross, in a scene as barbaric as it was rudimentary. François Hollande, then President of the Republic, went there the same day and declared: “To attack a church, to kill a priest, is to profane the Republic which guarantees freedom of conscience. »
The Islamic State (IS) organization had been seeking for some time to attack churches, in order to implement its strategy of religious war in the West. As early as April 2015, Sid-Ahmed Ghlam, who murdered Aurélie Chatelain, had failed in his plan to attack a church in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne). He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The choice of a Catholic target, intended to trigger reprisals aimed at Muslims in France in order to push them into the arms of IS, was repeated with the abortive attack on gas canisters near Notre-Dame cathedral. of Paris, on September 4, 2016, and the knife attack which caused three deaths in the basilica of Nice, on October 29, 2020.
If the scenario desired by the IS of a religious war fortunately did not occur, in particular thanks to the mobilization of Christians and Muslims in the Rouen region on the occasion of the funeral of Father Hamel, the holding of the trial, in the midst of the presidential campaign electrified by the emergence of the candidacy and ideas of Eric Zemmour, risks reviving extremist discourse.
A terrorist project formed quickly
In fact, there will be two trials for the Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray attack. The first is that of the attack as such, the main protagonists of which are dead, with the exception of Guy Coponet, 92 years old today, who had been forced to film the assassination with a mobile phone, seriously injured. stabbing, and of four women who were witnesses. This trial will be an opportunity to return to the chronology of events, and in particular the express radicalization of Kermiche and Petitjean, as well as the even more rapid formation of their terrorist project.
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