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A trial referring to a 2016 assassination try on a priest started in Paris on Monday.
The assault that murdered 85-year-old priest Jacques Hamel in a Catholic church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray close to Rouen shook France.
Police had shot and killed the 2 assailants on the scene. The trial on Monday includes alleged accomplices.
Catholic Church officers have launched the method to hunt beatification for Hamel, a primary step to canonization or sainthood
Who’s on trial?
The French authorities initially charged 4 males, together with the alleged instigator, for the assault. Nevertheless, the alleged instigator is believed to have died in a bomb assault in Iraq. As his loss of life just isn’t formally confirmed, he’s formally on trial in absentia.
The opposite three face prices of membership in a terrorist group, which they’ve denied. Their legal professionals have described them as “scapegoats.”
The 2 19-year-old attackers, who have been shot and killed on the scene, had claimed in a video to be members of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) group.
IS later referred to as them its “troopers” and stated the assault was in retaliation for France’s struggle towards jihadists in Syria and Iraq.
Prosecutors say the three knew in regards to the attackers’ plan, and one in all them had accompanied one of many attackers to Turkey — in an try to succeed in Syria — simply weeks earlier than the homicide.
What occurred?
Throughout morning Mass on July 26, 2016, two attackers first took six individuals hostage within the church in a working-class suburb.
Father Hamel had his throat slit on the foot of the altar whereas a nun was capable of escape and lift the alarm.
One of many worshipers taken hostage, Man Coponet, was additionally severely injured. Coponet, now 92, is predicted to attend not less than a part of the court docket periods “to grasp how these youths, barely out of adolescence, may commit such horrors,” his lawyer advised the AFP information company.
France has been dealing with a sequence of jihadist assaults that started with the 2015 Charlie Hebdo bloodbath.
fb/dj (AFP, dpa)
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