Strasbourg suspect a former convict on extremist watchlist

The 29-year-old man being sought by police over a mass shooting in Strasbourg lived in a rundown housing scheme and has been imprisoned in France and Germany.

The man, not named yet by French authorities, lived in the Poteries area of Strasbourg about 20 minutes by train from the centre of the French city and its Christmas market, which he is suspected of attacking on Tuesday night.

“It’s a building for desperate people. No one wants to live there,” said local Bemba N’diaye, near the nine-storey block in the Hohberg district where the suspect lived. “People there are very isolated,” N’diaye said.

Others said the man was known there for his criminal record, but he kept a low profile.

The suspected gunman had been sentenced 27 times in France, Germany and Switzerland, mostly for violence and robbery, prosecutor Remy Heitz told reporters.

He has “never been linked to terrorist offences”, deputy interior minister Laurent Nunez told France Inter radio on Wednesday. The man was added to watchlist of possible extremists while in prison in France in 2015 after he “called for practising a radical form of religion”, he said.

Police tried to arrest him on Tuesday morning for an attempted murder, but he was not at home, Nunez said.

The suspect has been monitored by France’s domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI.

German authorities were on the lookout for the fugitive on Wednesday “along the Rhine”, which serves as the border between France and Germany, a spokesperson from the Baden-Wuerttemberg region said.

“But at the moment we do not believe that he has crossed into the country,” he added.

The lone gunman shot and stabbed passers-by at the traditional Christmas market on Tuesday evening. He killed three people and wounded 13.