Three traveling companions and a large absentee presumed dead in Iraq: four people suspected of responsibility in the assassination in July 2016 of Father Hamel in his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray are referred to the special assize court.
The two assailants were shot dead by the police when they left the church in this small town on the industrial suburb of Rouen.
According to the order of indictment which AFP was able to take cognizance of, the investigating judges in charge of the case dismiss one of four defendants for "complicity in terrorist assassination".
The shadow of Rachid Kassim
This is the propagandist and likely instigator of the attack, Rachid Kassim.
Targeted by an arrest warrant, this jihadist, also accused of having remote-controlled the Magnanville attack in the Paris region and several plans for attacks in France, was allegedly killed in 2017 in the Iraqi-Syrian zone.
According to the judges, he "knowingly encouraged and facilitated the passage to the act" of the two attackers, Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean, with "operational advice and instructions in order to commit the attack" by the messaging system Telegram.
Emmanuel Macron pays tribute to Father Hamel
Three other people, Farid K., Yassine S. and Jean-Philippe Steven Jean-Louis, are sent back to the assizes for "criminal terrorist criminal association".
They are suspected of having associated with the attackers by being informed of their terrorist intentions, but not necessarily of their precise project.
Petitjean's cousin denies any hint of violent action
Farid K. was arrested the day after the attack.
This cousin of Abdel Malik Petitjean, aged 35, is notably accused of having wanted to go to Syria, of having wanted to commit a violent action in France and of having supported his cousin when he learned that he initiated a terrorist project.
According to his lawyer Me Simon Clémenceau, Farid K.: "He has never expressed the wish to commit a violent action".
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Yassine S., from the Toulouse suburbs, is 26 years old.
Arrested a few days after the attack, he had joined the two jihadists in this small town of Seine-Maritime the day before the attack.
He told the investigating magistrate that he had made this 1000 km journey thinking "to be among young people, like a summer camp to learn religion", and had finally left them 24 hours before the attack, attributing this departure to the remarks of the future attackers. on his "lax" practice of Islam.
Finally, Jean-Philippe Steven Jean-Louis, 24, was implicated later, in 2018. The judges suspect him of having supported and "provided advice to Abdel Malik Petitjean regarding his terrorist inclinations" and of having tried to go with him "on multiple occasions to Syria" to the Islamic State group.
86-year-old parishioner forced to film
The assassination in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray of Father Hamel, a highly symbolic target, had an international impact, twelve days after the terrorist attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice (86 dead on July 14, 2016).
In front of three nuns and a couple of parishioners, the priest Jacques Hamel, 85, had just completed his morning mass on July 26, 2016.
VIDEO. Priest slaughtered. Moving tribute to Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray
Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean, 19, both listed S and who claimed to belong to the Islamic State organization, then entered through the sacristy, the first making the priest kneel.
Kermiche then stabbed him twice in the throat while an 86-year-old parishioner was forced to film the assassination with a phone before being stabbed in turn.
He was injured in the throat, arm and back, but survived.
Total support for "the jihadist theses" of the attackers
The investigation, which lasted more than four years, made it possible to identify the profile of the attackers, "unfortunate candidates for jihad", "both evolving within the jihadosphere" and "entered into a relationship via Telegram four days" before the attack.
The national anti-terrorism prosecution had estimated that this attack was for the attackers "a jihadist project among others", "still discussed only a few hours before their act."
The two men were also "extremely determined" and adhered "completely to the jihadist theses".
The memory of this attack was revived at the end of October by the attack on a basilica in Nice which left three people dead.
"After the assassination of Father Hamel in the summer of 2016, it is once again the Catholics who are attacked in our country, threatened", declared President Emmanuel Macron in Nice.