French shooting suspect left conspiracy letters
Paris (AFP) - France said Thursday the suspect arrested over this week's shootings in Paris was previously jailed for his role in a "Bonnie-and-Clyde" style multiple murder and left rambling letters denouncing conspiracies and media manipulation.
Abdelhakim Dekhar, 48, was arrested on Wednesday after a major manhunt following a shooting at the left-wing newspaper Liberation that left an assistant photographer seriously hurt, and another at the headquarters of the Societe Generale bank.
His DNA matched samples from the scenes of the attacks, officials said.
"All the evidence today points to his involvement" in the attacks, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said.
Dekhar was transferred to a police station in central Paris on Thursday.
A 32-year-old man who housed Dekhar led investigators to the fugitive.
The two men first met 13 years ago in London, where Dekhar lived for several years, Paris prosecutor Frederic Molins told a news conference.
Dekhar worked in a restaurant in the British capital, Molins said. He came to France in July with the intention of staying here a month but never returned to London.
'Fascist plot'
The undated letters found by investigators after his attacks are incoherent and attempt to explain his actions, investigators said.
They denounce capitalism and speak of "a plot aimed at the return of fascism in the media, in banks, in the policy on suburbs," Molins said.
Dekhar also accused journalists "of being paid to feed lies to citizens" and decried what he saw as the "dehumanisation" of people living in the suburbs.
Molins said the letters merit "being shown to a psychiatrist."
One letter mentioned Libya, Syria and the situation in the Arab world, news channel BFMTV said.
Dekhar was arrested Wednesday evening in a vehicle in an underground parking lot in the northwestern Paris suburb of Bois-Colombes, after apparently trying to commit suicide. He was in a semi-conscious state.
The shooter opened fire with a 12-gauge shotgun at the offices of Liberation early on Monday, hitting a 23-year-old photographer's assistant as he hauled gear in the lobby, then firing another blast that hit the roof before leaving within seconds.
He then crossed the city to the La Defense business district on its western edge, where he fired several shots outside the main office of the Societe Generale bank, hitting no one.
He hijacked a car and forced the driver to drop him off near the Champs Elysees in the centre of the French capital, before disappearing.
Police say the shooter was the same man who last Friday stormed into the Paris headquarters of a 24-hour TV news channel, BFMTV, briefly threatening staff with a gun before hurrying out.
Left-wing radicals
Dekhar was convicted in 1998 of buying a gun used in an October 1994 shooting attack by student Florence Rey and her lover Audry Maupin, who moved in left-wing circles.
Three policemen, a taxi driver and Maupin himself were killed in that case that captivated France.
Investigators at the time compared the young couple to the infamous American outlaws Bonnie and Clyde.
Witnesses at the trial described Dekhar as a mentor to the couple and accused him of exploiting their youth to manipulate them, while his former lawyers have described him as "enigmatic" and "strange".
Dekhar had claimed in his defense that he had been a secret agent in the pay of Algerian security services, charged with infiltrating the radical left in France in search of those acting in coordination with Islamists in Algeria.
In the early 1990s he was known to hang out at squats used by left-wing radicals and which were often under police surveillance.
Maupin died of injuries sustained during a shootout with police and Rey, a middle-class student hitherto unknown to the police, was tried and sentenced to 20 years in jail. She was released in 2009.
Dekhar was acquitted of armed assault but found guilty of procuring the weapon and sentenced to four years. He was released soon afterwards, having already served his time in pre-trial detention.
