The French prosecutor's office has opened a preliminary investigation into allegations that a police intelligence note had been post-dated to cover up a failure to act against an Islamic extremist who, along with a cohort, ultimately murdered apriest in The probe concerns charges of forgery and alteration of documents, a judicial official said, and was triggered by a complaint filed by civil parties in the case surrounding the murder during Mass in the village of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy, northern France.
The opening of the investigation follows a report on Thursday by the online investigative publication Mediapart revealing the existence of the intelligence note on Adel Kermiche, alleging it was post-dated after the deadly attack on year-old Father Jacques Hamel and suggesting the murder might therefore have been avoided. The Mediapart article tackles the bureaucracy that allegedly kept the note about Kermiche from going up the command chain — and into the hands of the main intelligence service handling terrorism cases.
Based on months of interviews with police officers close to the intelligence operation, it cited low staffing on summer holidays, poor work conditions and, above all, the need for members of the hierarchy to sign off on intelligence documents submitted by the rank and file.
Father Hamel was killed by two year-olds who slit the aged priest's throat. The two killers were themselves killed by police as they left the church of Saint Etienne. ISIL claimed responsibility for the attack, as well as the attack in Nice earlier that month, July 14, when 84 people were killed by a man who drove his lorry down the seafront promenade as people celebrated the French national holiday.
In a statement, the office of the police chief of Paris police - where the intelligence note originated - denied the Mediapart allegations, saying the note evoked neither an imminent act nor "the targeting of a precise place". Once the attack occurred, the intelligence officer who wrote the note based on his intercepts on the encrypted Telegram channel "immediately made the link with the individual he had identified", the statement said.
