STRASBOURG, France (AP) – Cherif Chekatt’s criminal career began at age 10. By age 13 he had been convicted. Now, with his third decade still incomplete,…
STRASBOURG, France (AP) – Cherif Chekatt’s criminal career began at age 10. By age 13 he had been convicted. Now, with his third decade still incomplete, he is a fugitive, accused in the deadly shooting at France’s most famous Christmas market.
The 29-year-old has more than two dozen convictions, mostly in France but also in Switzerland and Germany. The rare times he’s been out of jail, he’s moved around. He had lived at his latest apartment, in a grim housing bloc on the edge of Strasbourg, for just a few months before police broke down the door in an unrelated case.
But Chekatt wasn’t home on Tuesday morning when the police arrived at the fifth-floor flat overlooking a pair of smokestacks and flat-topped houses in the distance. Further in the distance, barely visible, is downtown Strasbourg, where that evening he allegedly shouted “God is Great” in Arabic amid gunfire and shootouts with police in northeastern Strasbourg that left two dead, one person brain dead and 12 others injured.
Hundreds of officers fanned out Wednesday in a massive manhunt, hoping to put him behind bars yet again.
Police had been trailing Chekatt, a Strasbourg native and one of six siblings who was “well known” to authorities: He had 27 convictions in his criminal record, said Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz.
