Paris shooting suspect evokes echo of violent European ultra-left Photo released by Paris's Prefecture of Police shows the alleged shooter in the Concorde Metro station The dramatic arrest of the man suspected of launching a shooting spree in Paris earlier this week has evoked a chilling echo of the violent extreme left that once stalked continental Europe. President François Hollande's government, under heavy political pressure over high taxes and unemployment, was relieved by the rapid capture of the suspect, which afforded it a rare success story. But what startled French authorities was the sudden reappearance of a man convicted 15 years ago for his part in one of the bloodiest episodes involving armed leftists to hit Paris - an event that unfolded like a scene from a Luc Besson movie. François Molins, the state prosecutor in Paris, said letters written by Abdelhakim Dekhar, the suspect captured semi-comatose by police after an apparent suicide attempt in an underground car park on Wednesday evening, contained attacks on capitalism and media "manipulation." Whether that was the real motive for the latest attacks was unclear. But French media were quick to recall Mr Dekhar's role in an incident in October 1994 involving a radical young French couple said by police to have been inspired by 1980s French armed revolutionary group Action Directe. Action Directe had links to the Red Army Faction in Germany and operated similarly to the Red Brigades in Italy. The three groups carried out numerous armed attacks on politicians, businessmen and other targets over a number of years. In the Paris incident in 1994, Florence Rey and Audry Maupin robbed a Paris police depot of two handguns. In a subsequent chaotic car chase across the centre of the capital, they hijacked a taxi and then another a car. Three policemen and the taxi driver died in successive shoot-outs. Maupin was fatally wounded but Rey survived and was imprisoned until 2009. Mr Dekhar, now 48, was suspected at the time of being the "third man" in the gun robbery and the mentor of the younger Rey and Maupin, supplying them with a pump-action shotgun. He denied involvement, but was sentenced to four years in jail at their trial in 1998 for being an accomplice. He was released shortly afterwards, as he had been in detention since the incident. He then slipped off the police radar, apparently living for much of the time in London until re-emerging in Paris last Friday when a man, whom police say was him, burst into the reception of BFMTV news channel, brandishing a pump-action shotgun. French media were quick to recall Mr Dekhar's role in an incident in October 1994 involving a radical young French couple said by police to have been inspired by 1980s French armed revolutionary group Action Directe He did not open fire. But on Monday morning, police say the same man shot and badly wounded a photographer's assistant in a similar intrusion at the offices of the leftwing newspaper Libération, then fired on the headquarters of Société Générale, the big French bank. He hijacked a car before disappearing on the Champs Elysées. Mr Molins said on Thursday that Mr Dekhar had come back to Paris in July from London, where he apparently worked in a restaurant, to stay with a friend (who eventually turned him in). He said police had recovered two undated letters from Mr Dekhar in which he railed in a confused manner against a "fascist plot," capitalism and the state of France's deprived suburbs and accused the media of being paid "manipulators of the masses." He also evoked events in the Arab world. But Mr Molins did not assert that Mr Dekhar was politically motivated. He pointed out that Mr Dekhar had been considered at the time of the Rey-Maupin affair as a disturbed character with "fantasist tendencies." Of Algerian background, he lived in squats and apartments associated with activists of the extreme left. But lawyers who defended him told French media that he had insisted he had been recruited by the Algerian secret service. "He said his mission was to infiltrate the ultra-left which could have had links to Islamists and the Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group)," Raphael Constant, one of the lawyers representing Mr Dekher, told Le Monde newspaper.