An attacker armed with a sawn-off shotgun seriously wounded a Greek Orthodox priest in a shooting outside a church in the French city of Lyon …
An attacker armed with a sawn-off shotgun seriously wounded a Greek Orthodox priest in a shooting outside a church in the French city of Lyon on Saturday, with the country still reeling from a deadly church attack days before. Nikolaos Kakavelaki,52, was closing his Lyon church mid-afternoon when he was attacked and is now in a serious condition in hospital, said a police source who asked not to be named. The attacker fled the scene but Lyon’s public prosecutor later announced that a suspect had been arrested. « A person who could correspond to the description given by the initial witnesses has been placed in policy custody, » prosecutor Nicolas Jacquet said, adding that the suspect had not been carrying a weapon when he was arrested. The priest was shot twice in the chest at point-blank range, according to sources close to the inquiry. The motive for the attack was not clear. « At this stage, no hypothesis is being ruled out, nor favoured, » Jacquet said. But it comes at a time when France is already on edge after the killing of three people inside a church in Nice on Thursday and the beheading of a teacher earlier this month who had showed his class a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed. The Lyon prosecutor’s office said in a statement that witnesses, and a passing police patrol, heard gunshots then « saw an individual fleeing and discovered a man with gunshot wounds at the back door of the church ».
