« The 29-year-old was armed with a gun and a knife and escaped the area in a taxi… »
The Strasbourg shooter has been identified as Chérif Chekkat, a 29-year-old man born in France who has a long criminal history. Having been convicted 27 times for robbery and other crimes, Chekkat was sent to prison between 2013 and 2015. That’s where he became radicalized and was placed on a watch list by French authorities. From the Guardian:
French investigators call them the “gangster-jihadists” – young men, often from poor immigrant backgrounds, who start with petty crime, drug dealing and robbery and graduate to terrorism…
Chekkat was born in Strasbourg in February 1989, into a family with Moroccan roots, and appears to have fallen first into petty crime then gangster circles. The final stage, his apparent move into Islamic extremism, was reportedly sparked – or at least strengthened – during a spell in prison between 2013 and 2015…
By the age of 29 he had [27] convictions for theft and violence, the public prosecutor Rémy Heitz said. On the morning of the Strasbourg attack, he was to have been arrested in connection with attempted murder linked to an armed robbery that went wrong last summer.
