France Terror Suspect Shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Attacking Christmas Market

Before he opened fire on a crowded Christmas market in Strasbourg, France on Tuesday, 29-year-old Cherif Chekatt yelled “Allahu Akbar,” Paris’ public prosecutor said Wednesday — the first official statement pegging the deadly shooting as an Islamic terror attack.

Though no groups have claimed responsibility for the attack, Islamic terrorists have a history of plotting assaults at Christmas markets — including one disrupted plot in which nearly a dozen militants sought to bomb the Strasbourg market around the millennium.

Chekatt escaped from the scene in a taxi, bizarrely bragging to the driver about being injured in a firefight with soldiers after killing 10 people, officials said. Police said three people were killed in the attack.

A wide-scale manhunt was underway near Strasbourg as the French government raised the security level and sent police reinforcements to the city, located about 305 miles east of Paris. But a top French official admitted Chekatt may no longer be in the city and could have slipped through the police dragnet into neighboring Germany, where he’d spent time in prison. . .

[Senior Interior Ministry official Laurent] Nunez said Chekatt had been radicalized in prison and was being monitored by French intelligence services since at least 2015 due to his suspected religious extremism. Authorities did not say which religion; however, supporters of the Islamic State terror group were celebrating the shooting online, according to the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence group, which monitors jihadi communications worldwide. (Read more from “France Terror Suspect Shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Attacking Christmas Market” HERE)

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