Turkey alerted France to Normandy killer

(ANSA) - Paris, July 28 - Turkish secret services warned their French counterparts about Normandy church attacker Abdel Malik Petitjean but their alert arrived too late to stop him killing a priest, France Info radio reported on Thursday.
    According to the radio channel, the attacker was added to a blacklist on June 29. The procedure would have led to an alarm being raised upon his return to France, but he had already come back into the country on June 11.
    French intelligence assumed he was still in Syria or Turkey. But in fact he was back in France and able to carry out the assault on the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in which Father Jacques Hamel, 86, was knifed to death.
    Separately on Thursday, the weekly magazine L'Express published some audio messages sent by Telegram by the second attacker, 19-year-old Adel Kermiche, in which he encourages other people to take similar action to him.
    "Take a knife, go to a church and create a bloodbath. Cut off two or three heads, and then it's finished," the magazine quoted Kermiche as saying in the audio message.
    Islamic State (IS) has released a video that it says shows the two men pledging allegiance to the radical Islamist group.