Muslim community refuses to bury 'tainted' teen who killed French priest
Religious leaders refused to bury Kermiche's body, saying they do not want to 'taint' Islam by having any connection to a jihadist.
Normandy: Muslims in the hometown of Adel Kermiche, the teenager who slit the throat of an elderly priest in a church in France, have refused to bury him.
The 19-year-old, along with Abdel Malik Petitjean, also 19, burst into a church on the outskirts of Rouen during morning mass on Tuesday and killed the 85-year-old father at the altar. They were both shot dead by the police soon after.
Read: French church attack: Muslims invited to church to mourn murdered priest
According to a report in the Independent, religious leaders in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray have refused to prepare or bury Kermiche’s body, saying they do not want to “taint” Islam by having any connection to the jihadist.
Mohammed Karabila, president of the local Muslim cultural association and imam at a local mosque said, “We’re not going to taint Islam with this person. We won’t participate in preparing the body or the burial.”
Kermiche was an attention-seeking child whose behavioural problems frequently led him to a psychiatric hospital and later a specialist school. He died a coldblooded killer who slit the throat of an elderly French priest in the name of ISIS.
The son of a working class Franco-Algerian family living just outside the Normandy city of Rouen, the teenager flipped between model student and aggressor as a youngster. He blipped on the radar of security services in early 2015, when he made his first failed bid to reach Syria.
"He was a loner. He was a troubled soul, he was all alone in his head," said a neighbour of the Kermiche family house in a leafy Rouen suburb where the 19-year-old was forced to live under a court surveillance order. "All he would talk about was Syria."
A judicial source said Kermiche received regular psycho-therapy and medication between the ages of six and 13, at which point he was sent to school for pupils with behavioural problems.
Following the attack, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, calling the pair of attackers “soldiers of the Islamic State”. Isis’ Amaq propaganda agency later released video footage of the French attackers pledging allegiance to the terror group.