By the time he opened fire on a Christmas market in France, the killer had spent nearly two decades as a menace to Europe:

Cherif Chekatt’s criminal career began at age 10. By age 13 he had been convicted. Now, with his third decade still incomplete, he is a fugitive, accused in the deadly shooting at France’s most famous Christmas market.

The 29-year-old has more than two dozen convictions, mostly in France but also in Switzerland and Germany. The rare times he’s been out of jail, he’s moved around. He had lived at his latest apartment, in a grim housing bloc on the edge of Strasbourg, for just a few months before police broke down the door in an unrelated case.

But Chekatt wasn’t home on Tuesday morning when the police arrived at the fifth-floor flat overlooking a pair of smokestacks and flat-topped houses in the distance. Further in the distance, barely visible, is downtown Strasbourg, where that evening he allegedly shouted “God is Great” in Arabic [“Allahu Akbar”] amid gunfire and shootouts with police in northeastern Strasbourg that left two dead, one person brain dead and 12 others injured.

Hundreds of officers fanned out Wednesday in a massive manhunt, hoping to put him behind bars yet again.

Police had been trailing Chekatt, a Strasbourg native and one of six siblings who was “well known” to authorities: He had 27 convictions in his criminal record, said Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz. Chekatt was also tracked by the domestic counterintelligence service, DGSI — France’s equivalent of the FBI.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said by age 10 the suspect “already had behavior that fell under penal law.” . . .

Authorities say he was flagged for Islamic extremism in prison in 2015 and put on the “Fiche S” radical watch list then. It’s a profile familiar to many in European security, and has hit France particularly hard — that of a petty criminal who fuses a life of violence with Islamic extremism.

Here’s a question: If this profile is so “familiar,” why are they turning these monsters loose on the streets? And why are they embracing open borders policy to bring more monsters to Europe?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!







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