Italian President, PM, pay tribute to journalist killed in Strasbourg mass shooting

The Italian President and Prime Minister have paid tribute to an Italian journalist who died as a result of Tuesday night’s shooting at Strasbourg Christmas market.

Radio journalist Antonio Megalizzi was just 29 when he was shot in the head by Cherif Chekatt, a petty criminal who was radicalised into a “gangster-jihadist”. Chekatt was killed in a shootout with police on Thursday evening in Neudorf, a suburb to the south of the French city.

Megalizzi succumbed to his injuries yesterday, bringing the total death toll to 4.

Italian Prime Minster Giuseppe Conte tweeted his profound sadness after the news broke. Megalizzi was “a young man with a great passion for journalism, for radio, for investigations and for the European institutions,” he said.

The President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella , described the death of Antonio Megalizzi as "an unacceptable tragedy" and expressed his profound sadness. "I am particularly close - Mattarella added - to the grief of the family, the girlfriend and the friends of the young Italian reporter who is a victim of the criminal hatred and of the fanaticism advocated by the self-styled "Islamic State.” 

The National Federation of the Italian Press and the Order of Journalists , together with their representatives from Trento and Bolzano, expressed their condolences to Megalizzi’s family. "He wanted to tell the world and foster the knowledge of those differences and differences that are the richness of a united Europe: diversity and differences that are, instead, hated by the fanatic integralism of every nature and colour. The name of Antonio Megalizzi enters, unfortunately, in the list of those who lost his life because he had chosen to be a guardian of truth", the federation said in a statement.