>Gunman kills at least four people in French Christmas market
>A gunman killed at least four people and wounded 11 others near a Christmas market in the French border city of Strasbourg on Tuesday evening before being cornered by police.
>The motive was not immediately clear but, with France still on high alert after a wave of attacks commissioned or inspired by Islamic State militants since early 2015, the counter-terrorism prosecutor opened an investigation.
>Some two hours after the attack, elite police cornered the suspect and shots were fired, a source close to the operation said. French media reported the assailant was holed up in a store on the Rue Epinal.
>The Christmas market was being held amid tight security this year, with unauthorized vehicles excluded from surrounding streets during opening hours and checkpoints set up on bridges and access points to search pedestrians' bags.
>Sources familiar with the police operation said the suspect was a 29-year-old whose residence had been raided earlier in the day in connection with a robbery during the summer. The suspect was not in the building at the time.
>The gunman entered the market over a bridge at about 8 p.m. (1900 GMT) before opening fire, the prefecture said, adding that the suspect was a known security risk and on a watch list.
>Some 26,000 individuals suspected of posing a security risk to France are on the "Fiche S" watchlist, of whom about 10,000 are believed to have been radicalized, sometimes in fundamentalist Salafist Muslim mosques, online or abroad.
>European security agencies have feared for some time that Islamist militants who left Europe to fight for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq would return after the jihadist group's defeat, with the skills and motivation to carry out attacks at home.
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