A rose for a roiled nation
French President Emmanuel Macron pays his respects Friday evening near the Christmas market in Strasbourg, where a gunman opened fire Tuesday night, killing four people and wounding a dozen more. Macron was visiting as he grapples with not only the Strasbourg attack, but also increasingly violent protests over the cost of living.
STRASBOURG, France — Investigators on Friday kept digging for possible accomplices a day after French police killed the man who they believed attacked Strasbourg’s Christmas market.
A fourth victim of Tuesday night’s attack on the biggest Christmas market in France died Friday. The dead included a Thai tourist and a 29-yearold Italian journalist. A dozen other people were wounded.
The market reopened Friday in a bid to reclaim a festive spirit after being closed for two days after the attack. French President Emmanuel Macron paid a visit, arriving after a European summit in Brussels, to offer his condolences to the wounded and the victims’ families and to salute security forces. He spoke with the three police officers who less than 24 hours earlier shot and killed Cherif Chekatt, the attack suspect.
For three days, Macron has faced back-to-back national emergencies, dealing with the Christmas market attack in the midst of a month of grassroots protests over the cost of living that have grown increasingly violent and have devastated parts of the French capital.
The government has implored the French not to take to the streets today, evoking the Strasbourg tragedy and the security situation that has strapped soldiers and police.
Chekatt, a 29-year-old Strasbourg native, was killed Thursday night in a confrontation with three police officers in his childhood neighborhood after a manhunt.
The depth of his radicalization and connections remained unclear, but his path seemed to reflect an increasingly common hybrid European extremist who moves from delinquency to sowing terror.
The Islamic State group’s Amaq news agency claimed Chekatt was a “soldier” of the group, but Interior Minister Christophe Castaner rejected the claim as “totally opportunistic.”
Investigators are now trying to identify “eventual accomplices or co-authors who could have helped or encouraged him in preparing his move into action,” prosecutor Remy Heitz, in charge of terrorism cases in France, told reporters at a news conference Friday.
He said seven people were in custody, including four of Chekatt’s family members and three in his “close entourage” — two of them detained Thursday night.
“We want to reconstruct the past 48 hours in order to find out whether he got some support,” Heitz said.
Macron suggested while in Brussels that authorities were working to clarify why Chekatt was not stopped beforehand. He had been on a French intelligence watch list for radicalism and was convicted 27 times for criminal offenses — the first time at age 13 — mainly in France but also in Germany and Switzerland.
French police tried and failed Tuesday morning to arrest him in a case of attempted homicide.
Macron told reporters Friday in Brussels that France should look at “the consequences” of any police failures and work on “what could be improved.”