Video Captures Aftermath of Strasbourg Shootout

Mass shooting suspect Cherif Chekatt was killed
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Dec 14, 2018 2:58 AM CST

The immediate aftermath of the shootout between French security forces and the suspect in the Strasbourg attack has been caught on camera from across the street, with video footage showing armed officers at the scene and the body of the man slumped in a doorway. More officers arrive at the scene soon after, followed by crime scene investigators who take photos of the body and the surroundings. The Paris prosecutor's office, which handles terror cases in France, formally identified the man on Thursday as 29-year-old Cherif Chekatt, a Strasbourg-born man with a long history of convictions for various crimes, including robberies. Chekatt also had been on a watch list of potential extremists.

Chekatt was suspected of killing three people and wounding 13 near Strasbourg's Christmas market on Tuesday night, the AP reports. Security forces spent hours Thursday searching in the Neudorf neighborhood where Chekatt had grown up based on "supposition only" he might have been hiding in a building nearby, a French police official said. Before Thursday's shootout, hundreds of people gathered in Strasbourg's renowned 500-year-old cathedral to mourn and seek comfort. "Evil does not prevail," Archbishop Luc Ravel said. "And the message of Christmas has not been contradicted but rather confirmed by Tuesday's dramatic night: Evil and good are both there, but in the end the good will have last word." (Investigators believe Chekatt was radicalized in prison.)

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