The president of France, Francoise Hollande, arrived to the scene of the grisly terror attack in Northern France today, where two terrorists armed with knives broke into a church and took the priests inside hostage. They succeeded in beheading an 84-year-old priest inside before being killed by security forces.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
"ISIS has declared war on us," Hollande said at the site. "We must fight this war with all our means," he said, afterward qualifying his words by emphasizing the need "to respect the limits of the law, because that is what makes us a democracy."
According to reports, one of the terrorists had recently been freed from prison, and apparently had a tracking device attached to his ankle to check his movements, since he was only allowed to be outdoors at certain hours of the day.
The attack comes just a few weeks after a deadly terror attack in the French city of Nice, in which a jihadist terrorist plowed a truck into a crowd of people, killing more than 80. A state of emergency is still in place after that attack.
Unlike in that incident, as well as recent attacks in Germany, this latest attack appears to have been more organized, given that two assailants were involved.
France has been rocked by a string of Islamist terror attacks of late, and pressure is building on the embattled government of Francois Hollande to take effective action to curb the attacks.