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French police arrest newspaper shooting suspect
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The suspect in a shooting at a French newspaper office and three other attacks had written a “confused” letter criticizing media manipulation and capitalism and including a vague reference to Syria, authorities said yesterday.
Suspect Abdelhakim Dekhar is in custody in a suburban Paris hospital after police detained him on Wednesday night, ending a two-day nationwide manhunt. Police found him in a “semi-conscious state” after an attempt to kill himself with medication, Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters.
The prosecutor said Dekhar, who has lived in Britain for several years, was detained on suspicion of attempted murder and kidnapping in four incidents, including the shooting of an assistant photographer at leading daily newspaper Liberation on Monday.
He was also involved in an incident last week at the BFM-TV network in which he threatened staff with a gun, police said.
The suspect also fired shots at the headquarters of French bank Societe Generale and took hostage a driver briefly at gunpoint and forced him to drive from a western suburb to central Paris.
Dekhar came to police attention in the 1994 as part of an anarchist plot to sow chaos in Paris that culminated in a high-profile robbery and car chase that left three police officers, a taxi driver and one attacker dead. Dekhar was convicted as an accomplice and served four years in prison in the so-called Rey-Maupin affair, one of the bloodiest common crimes in France in a decade, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said.
Police found Dekhar in a parking garage after a witness came forward to say the suspect had been staying with him. Police had asked the public to help find the suspect and distributed video surveillance images of him.
After his arrest, investigators found two letters he left behind, Molins said. One appeared to be a suicide note, and the other was a “rather confused” letter evoking “fascist plots.”
In the second letter, the suspect accuses the media of “participating in the manipulation of the masses, journalists are paid to make the citizens swallow lies with a little spoon.”
He also criticizes capitalism and government neglect of suburban housing projects.
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