France Captures Newspaper, TV Shooting Suspect

After a two-day nationwide manhunt, French police have arrested a suspect in the shooting of a newspaper assistant photographer and three other attacks. The country's interior minister identified the suspect as Abdelhakim Dekhar, convicted in 1998 as an accomplice to an anarchist couple in a high-profile 1994 robbery and car chase that left three police officers and a taxi driver dead. Dekhar served four years in prison in the so-called Rey-Maupin affair but authorities had no trace of him in recent years, the minister says.

Based on DNA data, authorities believe he was the lone gunman behind Monday's shooting at the prominent daily newspaper Liberation, a shooting outside French bank Societe Generale, a brief hostage-taking in which the suspect hijacked a car, and a similar shooting incident three days before at news network BFM-TV. Dekhar apparently tried to kill himself before he was arrested. "My colleagues noticed he was not very lucid. They deduced that he had taken medicines, because of the capsules nearby," a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office says. He was hospitalized, and is now "incarcerated, but in a medical environment." The motive for the attacks remains unclear. (More Paris stories.)