Injured jihadist on the run after attack
Hundreds of police across France and Germany were hunting yesterday for a 29-year-old man who killed at least two people while shouting Allahu akbar in the Christmas market in Strasbourg.
Seven of the wounded are in condition.
Cherif Chekatt, pictured, a native of the city with more than two dozen convictions for crimes in France, Germany and Switzerland, gave police the slip after firing an automatic pistol at passers-by and cutting them with a knife in the narrow streets of the city on Wednesday evening. People 13 people a critical fled amid the bloodied bodies on the cobblestones. One of those killed was a Thai tourist and one of the wounded was Italian, according to reports in Rome.
Chekatt, who had been wanted in connection with a murder and was being watched by anti-terrorist police, exchanged shots with four soldiers on patrol. He was wounded in the arm and hijacked a taxi, forcing the driver to drop him in Neudorf, an area of housing estates on the southern outskirts of Strasbourg.
More than 700 police officers were assigned to search for Chekatt. Border crossings to Germany, on the other side of the city’s three bridges across the Rhine, were sealed off but it was possible thathe had already fled there, Laurent Nunez, the deputy interior minister, said. As well as serving four years for two convictions for robbery with violence in France, Chekatt had been jailed in Germany, where he had lived.
German police stepped up security around Christmas fairs in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, whose southern border is 50km north of Strasbourg, and Berlin, where Anis Amri, a Tunisian, killed 11 people and injured 55 in a lorry attack on a Christmas market two years ago.
The third lethal terrorist attack in France this year happened as President Emmanuel Macron struggled to defuse a crisis caused by the yellow vest protests against his administration. Politicians and moderate union activists asked people not to join a fifth round of demonstrations in Paris and other cities on Saturday, but more radical members insisted that the marches would go ahead.
– The Times