French terrorist still at large

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan24) – As morning broke on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, the gunman responsible for a mass shooting the night before remained at large, despite a massive manhunt, involving helicopters and Special Forces.

Shortly before 8:00 PM, a 29-year old, identified in the French media as Cherif Chekatt, born in Strasbourg, killed three people in the city center. He also wounded 12 others, eight of them seriously, before fleeing. Twice, he was involved in a shoot-out with French forces, but, nonetheless, the night passed without his capture.

Christian Leuprecht, a terrorism expert and professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, told France 24 that Chekatt’s success in evading arrest suggested that he had help from at least one other person, although no terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Strasbourg lies on the Rhine River, the border between France and Germany. The suspect has a long criminal history in both countries. Earlier on Tuesday, police had sought to arrest Chekatt for armed robbery, but he was not home when they arrived.

Strasbourg is a very old city, dating back to Roman times. The city, which calls itself “The Capital of Christmas,” hosts an annual Christmas market, the largest in France and the oldest in Europe. Security was tight, as two years before, a Christmas market in Berlin had been attacked with multiple fatalities.

Strasbourg’s old city center is surrounded by water, and it is accessible only by crossing one of several bridges. Most vehicles were prevented from entering the city center, while the bags of those crossing on foot were supposed to be checked by police. French reporters repeatedly asked how someone could have brought an automatic weapon into the market under such circumstances.

Strasbourg is the seat of the European Parliament, which was in session when the attack occurred. It is also the home of France’s largest mosque. In December 2000, French and German security services, in a combined operation, thwarted an al-Qaeda plot, targeting the same Christmas market.

Chekatt was known to French police and had been identified as a potential security risk. However, the names of some 5,000 individuals are on that list, and it is next-to-impossible for French authorities to keep track of all of them.

Starting in January 2015, France was rocked by a series of terrorist attacks. Between January 7 and January 9, 16 people were murdered when two brothers, who claimed links to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, attacked the office of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, followed by another assault on a Jewish supermarket that killed four people.

The terrorism culminated on November 13, when an Islamic State (IS) attack on multiple sites in the middle of Paris killed 130 persons, marking the most lethal terrorist assault in Europe since March 2004, when al-Qaeda in Iraq bombed commuter trains in Madrid, killing 193 people.

However, with newly energized domestic efforts against terrorism and the success of the US-led war against IS in Syria and Iraq, terrorism in France dropped sharply. Tuesday’s attack in Strasbourg revived distressing memories of the earlier assaults.

Editing by Nadia Riva