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A greek orthodox priest was seriously wounded this Saturday when he closed his church in Lyon, by an individual who fled, an assault without clear motives, in full tension due to the recent attacks against a teacher and a basilica in Nice.
“At the moment, no hypothesis is ruled out or privileged,” said the Lyon tax, Nicolas Jacquet, who specified that they arrested a suspect who “may correspond to the description given by the first witnesses.”
The security forces did not find the weapon probably used in the attack, a sawed-off shotgun, with the detainee. “Verifications continue to be made on their possible involvement,” said the prosecutor.
The incident took place around 4:00 p.m. local time (12:00 p.m. in Chile), which was warned by neighbors who heard two shots in the area of this Hellenic Orthodox church, located in a residential neighborhood of Lyon.
“They realized that a man was fleeing and discovered near the back door of the church a man who was shot, who turned out to be the priest of the place of worship,” explained the prosecution.
The Lyon prosecutor’s office also indicated that it opened an investigation for “murder” and said that it was in contact with the national antiterrorist prosecutor’s office, but this one for the moment did not take charge of the investigation.
Several police sources requested “caution about the motivations for the attack.”
The priest “was closing his church” at the time of the attack. So, “there was no ceremony” inside the temple and “the priest was not dressed in priestly clothing,” reported a source close to the investigation.
Nikolaos Kakavelakis, 52, he was shot twice, “in the liver and at point blank range”, for which he had to be hospitalized in a serious condition.
Crisis cell
The head of the Church of Greece, Archbishop Iéronymos, he denounced this attack as a “horror beyond human logic.”
According to an AFP journalist present at the scene, the small Art Deco-style church is located in a residential neighborhood of Lyon, where there were very few people on the street during the first Saturday of the new confinement in France.
After the attack, the Ministers of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, organized a crisis cell at his Ministry in Paris.
The Prime Minister Jean Castex He recalled “the total determination of the government to allow each and every one to practice their religion in complete safety and freedom.”
“Our will is strong and our determination will not wane. It is the honor of France, it is the honor of the Republic ”, added Castex during a displacement on Saturday in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (northwest), where a priest was slaughtered in a church in 2016 by two young jihadists.
Saturday’s attack comes just three days after the attack on the basilica of Notre-Dame de Nice, where a young jihadists armed with a knife murdered three people, and just two weeks after the beheading of Professor Samuel Paty.
Although the motivations of the attacker in Lyon are unknown, the President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, spoke of a “new attack” and defended that “Europe will never submit to violence and terrorism.”
The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, also condemned this “abominable act” and stated that “freedom of conscience in Europe is guaranteed for all and must be respected”.
The French government allowed places of worship to stay open until Monday to celebrate All Saints’ Day, before closing again due to the new confinement to curb the covid-19.
After the attack in Nice, the government raised the anti-terrorism alert to the maximum level and increased the number of soldiers deployed in the country to protect schools and places of worship from 3,000 to 7,000.
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