 | French police call them “gangster-jihadists” – young men, often from poor immigrant backgrounds, who start with petty crime, drug dealing and robbery and graduate to terrorism. The profile of Strasbourg attacker Chérif Chekatt is familiar in France. Chekatt was born in Strasbourg in 1989, into a Moroccan family.
He first fell into into petty crime, then gangster circles. He moved into Islamic extremism during a spell in prison between 2013 and 2015. | Like many youths growing up in outer-city housing projects in France, Chekatt was poor and unemployed. |