France was hit by 30 jihadist attacks, 13 of them fatal, between 2015 and 2018, in which 251 people were killed and hundreds more injured. The year 2018, which saw a timid resurgence as the Islamic State (IS) organization began its military decline in the Iraqi-Syrian zone, was marked by three fatal attacks in Trèbes and Carcassonne, southern France, where four people were killed. There were also attacks in Paris's lavish Opéra neighborhood, leaving one dead, and five people were killed at the Strasbourg Christmas market.

The attacks came successively, as are the criminal trials now. Six days after the verdict in the trial of the Trèbes and Carcassonne attacks, handed down on Friday, February 23, the trial of for the deadly attack committed by Cherif Chekatt, a radicalized delinquent who wreaked havoc on the streets of Strasbourg on December 11, 2018, opens on Thursday, February 29, before the Paris special criminal court.

As in the two previous attacks, the terrorist was killed by the police. As in the two previous trials, the court will have difficulty in meeting all the expectations of the plaintiffs. Only one of the four defendants is on trial for acts of a terrorist nature. The defendant, Audrey Mondjehi-Kpanhoue, is a friend of the killer. He is a short-lived figure of the Alsatian rap scene, who is being tried for "complicity in terrorist assassinations." The other three are on trial for common law offenses after having sold Chekatt weapons.

On December 11, 2018, at around 8 pm, Chekatt, a 29-year-old with a long criminal record, shot dead five bystanders and wounded 11 while shouting "Allah Akbar" as he walked around armed with an old barrel revolver and a knife in downtown Strasbourg.

The dead victims were all shot in the head in less than 10 minutes. The first two were friends: Bartosz Piotr Orent-Niedzielski, nicknamed "Bartek", a 36-year-old Franco-Polish man active in Strasbourg's cultural scene, and Antonio Megalizzi, a 29-year-old Italian journalist who worked for a university radio station at the European Parliament.

Ahmad Kamal Naghchband, a 45-year-old French-Afghan born in Kabul, had left Afghanistan with his family in 1999 to escape the Taliban regime. He was the third victim of the killer, who shot him dead in front of his wife and three children, aged 2, 5 and 6, near the large Christmas tree in Place Kléber. Pascal Verdenne, a 61-year-old retired banking employee, was murdered in front of La Stub restaurant where he had just had a drink with his partner.

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