France church attack: Second suspect ‘known to police’

France church attack: Second suspect 'known to police'

Abdel-Malik Petitjean, who took hostages and killed a priest in Normandy, had "Islamist militant" links, source says.

Police have identified the second assailant who attacked a church in northern France this week as a 19-year-old known to security services as suspected of having "Islamist militant" links, sources say.

Police on Thursday identified the man as Abdel-Malik Nabil Petitjean from a town in eastern France on the border with Germany, a judicial source told Reuters news agency.

Security services had in June opened a special file on Petitjean for becoming radicalised, a police source said separately.

The government has said there are about 10,500 such people in France.

Petitjean and an already identified accomplice, Adel Kermiche, took hostages at a church in Normandy on Tuesday before slitting the threat of an elderly priest at the altar.

Kermiche, also 19, had been awaiting trial on "terror" charges and had been fitted with an electronic tag despite calls from the prosecutor for him not to be released.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) released on Wednesday a video that purportedly shows the two men pledging allegiance to the group, which is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and operates in parts of Syria and Iraq.