French police name arrested Paris gun suspect

French authorities have named a man arrested on suspicion of carrying out recent gun attacks in Paris as Abdelhakim Dekhar.


Paris’s police prefecture handed out a picture of the suspected gunman in the Concorde metro station

He was taken into custody at about 18:00 GMT from a vehicle in a car park in Bois-Colombes, north-west of Paris.

Authorities said Dekhar had been jailed in 1998 for his role in a string of fatal shootings in Paris.

Last Friday a gunman threatened a Paris TV station and on Monday attacked a newspaper office and bank HQ.

Prosecutors said late on Wednesday that samples of Dekhar’s DNA matched that from the crime scenes.

They said he was not yet in a position to be questioned and the reading of his rights had been postponed.

Dekhar was arrested in a stationary car in an underground car park following a tip-off from a member of the public.

Police union official Christophe Crepin said: “My colleagues noticed he was not very lucid. They deduced that he had taken medicines, because of the capsules nearby.”

Some media sources have suggested he may have attempted suicide.

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