PARIS: France on Thursday identified the second militant involved in the brutal killing of an elderly priest, as calls mounted for the prime minister and interior minister to resign after the latest terror attack.

Prosecutors named the assailant as 19-year-old Abdel Malik Petitjean, who was listed in June on France’s “Fiche S” system of people posing a potential threat to national security after he tried to reach Syria from Turkey.

Petitjean, whose face was disfigured when he was shot dead by police, had been harder to identify than his accomplice Adel Kermiche, also 19.

Investigators confirmed Petitjean’s identity after a DNA match with his mother.

The two militants pledged allegiance to the militant Islamic State group in a video made before they stormed a church in the Normandy town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray on Tuesday and slit the throat of 86-year-old priest Jacques Hamel at the altar.

Hamel’s funeral will be held in the stunning Gothic cathedral of nearby Rouen next Tuesday, the city’s Catholic diocese said.

The attack came as the government was already facing a firestorm of criticism over alleged security failings after the Bastille Day truck massacre in Nice that left 84 people dead two weeks ago.

A brief show of political unity at a mass attended by different faiths in Paris on Wednesday quickly dissolved as Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve faced fresh calls to resign.

“Even if the government is not responsible for the wave of terrorism, it is guilty of not having done everything to stop it,” Laurent Wauqiez, the deputy leader of the right-wing Republicans party, said in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper.

“Manuel Valls and Bernard Cazeneuve must go because they refuse to take vital measures to fight Islamism. We need a new government, determined to act.” Meanwhile, President Francois Hollande responded to remarks by US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that “France is no longer France” as a result of the attacks.

“France will always be France, because France will never yield and because France is always the bearer of ideals, values and principles, for which we are recognised throughout the world,” Hollande said.

“When you lower your standards, you are no longer what you are. That’s something that may happen to others, on the other side of the Atlantic,” Hollande added in an allusion to Trump.

The French government has said that everything possible is being done to protect citizens, while warning that more terror attacks are inevitable, after three major strikes and several smaller attacks in the past 18 months.

Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2016