Suspected gunman's disturbing past before Christmas market shooting

A massive manhunt involving hundreds of police and soldiers was underway Wednesday for a suspected extremist who yelled “God is great!” in Arabic during a shooting spree around one of Europe’s most famous Christmas markets.

The assault in the eastern French city of Strasbourg killed two, left one person brain dead and injured 12 others, authorities said.

Police union officials identified the suspected assailant as Frenchman Cherif Chekatt, a 29-year-old with a thick police record for crimes including armed robbery and monitored as a suspected religious radical by the French intelligence services.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to publicly discuss details of the large and ongoing investigation into the attack that set France on edge.

The suspect’s parents and two brothers, also known for radicalism, have been detained, according to a judicial official.

Reflecting Strasbourg’s international nature, the dead included a Thai tourist, and an Italian was reportedly among the wounded. The US government, among others, warned citizens in the area to be vigilant. The city is home to the European Parliament and considers itself a capital of Europe — and promotes itself as the “capital of Christmas”.

From young criminal to fugitive attacker

Chekatt’s criminal career began at age 10. By age 13 he had been convicted. Now he is a fugitive, accused in the deadly shooting at France’s most famous Christmas market.

The 29-year-old has more than two dozen convictions, mostly in France but also in Switzerland and Germany. The rare times he’s been out of jail, he’s moved around.

He had lived at his latest apartment, in a grim housing bloc on the edge of Strasbourg, for just a few months before police broke down the door in an unrelated case.

But Chekatt wasn’t home on Tuesday morning when the police arrived at the fifth-floor flat overlooking a pair of smokestacks and flat-topped houses in the distance.

Hundreds of officers fanned out Wednesday in a massive manhunt, hoping to put him behind bars yet again.

Police had been trailing Chekatt, a Strasbourg native and one of six siblings who was “well known” to authorities. He had 27 convictions in his criminal record, said Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz.

Chekatt was also tracked by the domestic counterintelligence service, DGSI — France’s equivalent of the FBI.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said by age 10 the suspect “already had behaviour that fell under penal law”.

The Associated Press obtained two police photos of him, one when he appeared to be an adolescent, a sparse moustache on his upper lip, and a more recent one with a fuller moustache and beard and dark circles around his eyes.

Authorities say he was flagged for Islamic extremism in prison in 2015 and put on the “Fiche S” radical watch list then. It’s a profile familiar to many in European security, and has hit France particularly hard — that of a petty criminal who fuses a life of violence with Islamic extremism.

The 2016 court verdict, in the southern German city of Singen, said he was sentenced to prison in France in 2008 and in Basel, Switzerland, in 2013 for various robberies. News agency dpa reported that he was deported to France in 2017.

The verdict said Chekatt had worked for local authorities after leaving school, and had been unemployed since 2011. He had spent a total of four years in prison. The German robberies took place in Mainz, near Frankfurt, in 2012 and in Engen, near the Swiss border, in 2016.

Manhunt continues for ‘destabilised’ gunman

Police on Wednesday were guarding a building in the outer area of Strasbourg where Chekatt had lived since earlier this year, neighbours said.

The government raised the security alert level and sent police reinforcements to Strasbourg, where hundreds of police and soldiers were involved in the search.

A terrorism investigation was opened, but the motive of the attack is unclear.

At Chekatt’s apartment, in an outer neighbourhood of Strasbourg, the lock of the door was broken at his apartment. Police were guarding the building.

A neighbour, who asked not to be named because the gunman was still at large, said he was rarely home. She said she last saw him Monday from her window, which looks out on a common hallway, and he was with another man.

Young men from the apartment block said they knew him as someone who seemed destabilised by his time in prison.

“You can just tell,” said one, lightly touching the side of his head.

They, too, feared being publicly named because the gunman is still being hunted by police.

The suspected attacker’s more than two dozen convictions also included crimes in Germany and Switzerland, according to court documents seen by The Associated Press.

The German government says it has stepped up controls on the country’s border with France following the attack, but sees no change to the threat level in Germany.