Suspect arrested in France newspaper shooting identified as Abdelhakim Dekhar

GlobalPost
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French police have named the suspected gunman in a Paris newspaper office shooting as Abdelhakim Dekhar, a man jailed 15 years ago for his role in other fatal gun attacks.

A man "bearing a strong resemblance to the shooter" was arrested in a vehicle at a car park northwest of Paris on Wednesday evening after a tip-off from a member of the public, the Associated Press reported.

DNA samples from the suspect matched those taken at the crime scene, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said, according to France 24.

Dekhar may have attempted to take an overdose, according to police, who said he was found "not very lucid" and surrounded by pilll capsules. He was taken directly to hospital and has not yet been questioned, a police official told reporters.

Dekhar, 48, was also involved in a 1994 shootout in the French capital that killed four people. He was jailed in 1998 for allegedly providing the gun used by two French anarchists to shoot dead three policemen and a taxi driver. He claimed at the time that Algeria's secret services had paid him to infiltrate France's radical far-left.

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A photographer's assistant at Libération newspaper was seriously wounded in Monday's shooting before the gunman fired at least three shots into the lobby of the headquarters of Société Générale bank in the La Defense business district.

The motive for the attacks remains unclear.

Authorities had released surveillance video footage and photos of the suspect nationwide. An appeal for information generated nearly 700 calls, the BBC reported

The person who eventually alerted police to Dekhar's location had given the suspect accommodation before seeing the police appeal, according to France 24. The witness told officers that Dekhar had said: "I've made a stupid mistake."

More from GlobalPost: Photographer critical after shooting at French daily

Libération's editor-in-chief, Nicolas Demorand, expressed outrage at the attack.

"When you have someone with a shotgun coming into a newspaper's offices in a democracy, it is very, very serious, whatever the mental state of the person," Demorand told Agence France-Presse. "If papers and other media have to become bunkers, something has gone wrong in our society."

Sky News reported the photographer's assistant was arriving for his first day of freelance work at the newspaper when he was shot. 

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