TerrorismKiller of French priest was in jail for trying to join ISIS, but was paroled in March

Adel Kermiche, the mentally disturbed 19-year old ISIS follower who slit the throat of a Catholic priest during mass in the small town of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray — near Rouen in Normandy in north-west France — was sent to prison in May 2015 for trying to go to Syria to join ISIS, but was released on parole on March 2016 over the objections of the prosecution.

Kermiche’s family told the police that he had become increasingly radicalized, and friends said he talked openly about attacking a church.

Fellow students in the high school he attended described Kermiche as “easily influenced” and a “buffoon” who never took to learning. One teenager told Le Monde: “I wasn’t surprised. He talked about it all the time. He talked about Islam, the things like this he was going to do. He talked about the Qur’an and Mecca and he told me ‘I’m going to attack a church’. He said this two months ago on leaving the mosque. On my mother’s life I didn’t believe him.”

Kermiche and another teenager who took part in the were shot dead by police.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the German police stopped Kermiche in March 2015 as he tried to make his way to Syria to join ISIS. A French court gave him a conditional parole as he awaited trial. Ignoring the parole’s conditions, in May 2015 he made it to Turkey in a second attempt to joint ISIS, but was stopped by the Turkish police and sent back to France.r, he tried to enter Syria again, this time via Turkey.

He spent ten month in jail, and over the objections of the prosecution, was released in March 2016. He was ordered to wear an electronic bracelet, and was allowed to leave home only on weekdays between 8.30 a.m. and 12.30 a.m.

Parts of his legal file, published in Le Monde, show that he had exhibited signs of “psychological troubles” since the age of six, and that he was regularly hospitalized for these problems.

During a parole hearing in March this year, Kermiche told the judge he “regretted his attempts to leave for Syria.”

“I want to get back my life, to see my friends, to get married,” he said.

The public prosecutor objected. “Even if he is asking for a second chance, there’s a very strong chance he will do the same thing if he is released,” the prosecutor said.

The Tribune de Genève reports that after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015, he became secretive, started attending a mosque, and angrily lectured his non-practicing relatives and friends.

Kermiche’s parents immigrated to France from Algeria, and his mother is a professor at a local college. The family desperately tried to keep pull him back from his growing radicalization, but to no avail.

“He said that [Muslims] couldn’t exercise their religion peacefully in France,” his mother said. “He spoke with words that didn’t belong to him. He was under a spell, like a cult.”

The NouvelObs reports that a local Mosque tried to help the family, and asked him to stay away from prayers.

A local man who knew the teenager told Le Parisien: “Adel, he didn’t have much in his head, he wasn’t very smart and he’d never succeeded at anything.” Another local resident told the newspaper: “Everyone knows that this kid was a ticking time bomb. He was too strange.”

A neighbor of the family told Le Figaro that Kermiche showed visible signs of mental disturbance. “He was crazy, he was talking to himself.”