The two young jihadists who killed the priest on July 26, 2016, Adel Kermiche and Abdel-Malik Petitjean, were killed by the police as they left the small church in the suburbs of Rouen.
The three men who took their place in the box of the special assize court in Paris, Jean-Philippe Jean Louis, Farid Khelil and Yassine Sebaihia, are part of the entourage of the attackers. They appear for “terrorist criminal association”, suspected of having been aware of their projects, of having shared their ideology or tried to join Syria. The fourth defendant, Rachid Kassim, will be tried in his absence.
This French propagandist for the Islamic State group probably died in Iraq in 2017. He is suspected of having “knowingly encouraged and facilitated the action” of the two jihadists.
First to answer questions from the court, Farid Khelil, 36, assured that he had “a lot of trouble” with the facts of which he is accused, which he “disputes”. “This suit is too big for me.”
“Many Girlfriends”
In front of the court, he evokes with a smile on his lips a journey very far from radical Islam, with his “many girlfriends”, his consumption of cannabis (“It’s been 24 years that I’ve been in weaning”) or his trips to the Netherlands. Low and in Germany “for brothels”.
Long hair tied in a ponytail, small glasses and gray sweater, Farid Khelil also describes himself as a child in “lack of affection” after the divorce of his parents and describes his education “à la française” by a girl of harkis and the “injustice” he felt after being made redundant in 2015.
If he went to the mosque for a while to reconnect with his father, then visited his cousin Abdel-Malik Petitjean who introduced him to prayer and showed him propaganda videos to “raise awareness” of the fate Syrians, the accused claims to have “never had” a religious commitment and to have “never practiced”.
After him, Yassine Sebaihia, 27, explains how he turned to religion in 2016. Failed in his electrical engineering BTS studies, unemployed, at odds with his girlfriend, he has the feeling that he has been “cast a spell” and research information on the subject via “videos on the internet”.
This young man with long curly hair may say he is “naive” but claims to have “never had friends who have committed crimes”. He is prosecuted for having briefly joined the two jihadists in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray on July 24, before leaving the next day. He has always maintained that he had no knowledge of their plans for violent action.
” To understand “
The court is due to hear the third defendant, Jean-Philippe Jean Louis, on Tuesday. All three in pre-trial detention for five years, they face thirty years of criminal imprisonment.
Even before the start of the hearing, the civil parties expressed the wish to “understand”. Seriously injured by the two jihadists, Guy Coponet, a parishioner, wished “that justice be done”. He “wants to understand […] how young people just out of adolescence have come to commit such horrors, ”explained his lawyer, Me Méhana Mouhou.
One of Father Hamel’s sisters, Roseline, is also waiting for “the truth […] on the lack of means “given” to the public forces to avoid this massacre. One of the assassins, Adel Kermiche, was placed under an electronic bracelet at the time of the attack, after an aborted departure for Syria.
The Intelligence Directorate of the Paris Prefecture of Police (DRPP) was also implicated because, according to an article published in 2018 by Mediapart, its investigators had had access a week before the assassination to messages from the young man on the encrypted Telegram messaging where he mentioned an attack in a church.