French intelligence agencies knew of but did not act on information about Islamic Radical who beheaded French priest.

by Verity True

Through revelations of the French satirical paper Le Canard Enchaîné, it has been made known that the Intelligence Directorate of the Paris Police Prefecture (DRPP) had been monitoring one of the radical Islamic terrorists involved in the murder of the elderly priest Jacques Hamel in July 2016. Earlier this month it was revealed that the Intelligence Directorate had been following Adel Kermiche on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, and on social media. 

It has also been alleged that both the Military Intelligence Directorate (MRD) and the Central Intelligence Service Territorial (SCRT) had Kermiche under surveillance for weeks before the murder of Father Hamel, as reported in Le Figaro on 30 January 2018.

Father Hamel, the 85-year-old priest whose throat was slit as he was celebrating Mass in a Paris church, is now on the road to being declared a Christian saint. The Catholic archdiocese of Rouen formally opened the beatification process in recognition of Father Hamel as a martyred saint, killed out of odium fidei (hatred of the faith) by two 19-year-old Islamic State radicals, Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean. 

Just before having his throat slit, Father Hamel exclaimed “Be gone, Satan!”, according to the priest’s archbishop, Dominique Lebrun. The archbishop commented, “Evil is a mystery that reaches summits of horror beyond what is human…..Is that not what you meant, Jacques, by your last words?”

The process of beatification was initiated by Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney, a theologian and member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He said that the priest had undergone “the characteristic death of a martyr, as one who dies for his or her faith, and because of that faith.”

We cannot ignore the fact that this was “a targeted attack on our Christian faith,” Fisher said. “The two terrorists meant to go into a Catholic church. They meant to kill a priest of Jesus Christ. They meant to take nuns and faithful laity as hostages. They were not just looking for any old building with any old people inside.”

Last fall, Pope Francis decided to shorten the time before the opening the beatification process, which is usually set at five years.