French police investigate gunman’s ties to others following Strasbourg shoot-out

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) - Late on Thursday, Cherif Chekatt, the 29-year old Frenchman who shot and killed four people at Strasbourg’s Christmas Market on Tuesday, was himself shot and killed by police.

As French authorities explained, police saw a man who resembled Chekatt around 9:00 p.m., and as they approached to question him, he fired at them. Returning fire, they shot him dead.

The incident occurred in the city’s southeast Neudorf district, where Chekatt, of Moroccan origin, had been born and raised. He lived in “a grim housing bloc,” the Associated Press (AP) reported, which also quoted a neighbor as saying that he was “rarely home.”

Contrary to authorities’ earlier concerns, Chekatt did not cross into nearby Germany, but remained close to home and seemed to have no plan for escape. Possibly, his rampage was triggered by a police raid on his apartment earlier on Tuesday. Chekatt was not there, but police found an assault rifle, stun grenade, and several knives.

French authorities are now looking into whether Chekatt had any help in the shooting and his brief escape or whether anyone encouraged him to carry it out.

A neighbor said that she saw Chekatt on Monday, the day before, and “he was with another man, much older than he,” the AP reported.

In France, the Paris prosecutor’s office handles terrorism cases throughout the country.

On Friday, Remy Heitz, the Paris prosecutor, announced that police had detained seven people in conjunction with the attack: Chekatt’s parents, along with two brothers, as well as three others whom Heitz described as “part of [Chekatt’s] entourage.”

The French press reported that a third brother, Sami Chekatt, 34, had been detained in Algeria.

Heitz also announced that a fourth person had died from Tuesday’s shooting, which left 11 others injured. Italy’s Prime Minister explained that the fatality was a young Italian journalist, Antonio Megalizzi, who covered the European Parliament for Europhonica Radio.

The so-called Islamic State (IS) claimed credit for the attack shortly after French authorities announced that Chekatt had been killed in a shoot-out with police.

“The attack in the city of Strasbourg,” Amaq, IS’ media agency, posted, “is one of the soldiers of the Islamic State and he carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of the coalition" against us.

Amaq provided no evidence to support its claim, however, and French authorities dismissed it as opportunistic.

Chekatt had a long history of petty crimes, going back to a very young age. He was 10 years old when he had his first run-in with the law. He was first arrested at the age of thirteen, and then arrested 26 more times in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Chekatt is said to have been “radicalized” during a stint in prison in 2015. His early criminal activities raise the question of whether the appeal to him of an extreme form of Islam was not so much his piety, but a rationalization of his penchant for violence, Paul Davis, formerly a Pentagon analyst and now a Senior Fellow at Soran University, suggested to Kurdistan 24.

“We might be more successful in countering this violence,” Davis said, “if we put more emphasis on the criminal nature of these attacks” and the “dysfunctional, maladjusted character” of the individuals who commit them, rather than attributing them to some grand ideology.

Over 200 people have been killed in France in terrorist assaults since January 2015, when the office of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was attacked. The most lethal assault occurred on November 13, 2015, when 130 people died in an IS rampage in the center of Paris.