People pay respects the night following a shooting in Strasbourg, eastern France. Police officials identified the suspected assailant as a 29-year-old Frenchman with a thick police record for crimes including armed robbery who was monitored as a suspected religious radical by French intelligence services.

STRASBOURG, France — Hundreds of security forces combed eastern France for a 29-year-old man with a long criminal record who shouted “God is great!” in Arabic and sprayed gunfire during a deadly rampage in Strasbourg’s famous Christmas market, officials said.

Tuesday night’s attack at the Christmas market in Strasbourg killed two people, left a third brain-dead and injured 12, and was a stark reminder to a nation wounded by previous assaults that terrorism remains a threat, even as anti-government protests roil the country.

National police distributed a photo of the wounded fugitive, identified as Cherif Chekatt, with the warning: “Individual dangerous, above all do not intervene.”

France raised its three-stage threat index to the highest level and bolstered troops around France.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner told lawmakers that the French native, born in Strasbourg, had run-ins with police starting at age 10 and his first conviction at age 13.

Chekatt had been convicted 27 times, mostly in France but also in Switzerland and Germany, for crimes including armed robbery. He had been flagged for extremism and was on a watch list, but the interior minister said “the signs were weak.”

The emerging profile seemed to point to an increasingly common hybrid extremist who moves from acts of delinquency to sowing terror. “It’s a large zone and the search is difficult,” senior Interior Ministry official Laurent Nunez said on France-Inter radio. Strasbourg is on the border with Germany, where the suspect was convicted in 2016 of breaking into a dental practice and a pharmacy in two towns.

His parents and two brothers, also known for radicalism, were detained, a judicial official said.

Prosecutor Remy Heitz said the man attacked with a handgun and a knife about 8 p.m. Tuesday, and was shot in the arm during an exchange of fire with soldiers during his rampage. He then took a taxi to another part of the city, boasting of the attack to the driver, and later exchanged more gunfire with police and disappeared, Heitz said.

After initially reporting that three people had died, authorities revised that and said one was brain-dead, while 12 people were wounded, six of them gravely. The attack in the heart of old Strasbourg, near its famous cathedral and within the Christmas market that draws many tourists, unsettled the border city that also is home to the European Parliament. The German government said it had stepped up controls on the border with France but did not change its threat level.