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LYON: An attacker armed with a sawed-off shotgun seriously wounded a Greek Orthodox priest in a shooting outside a church in the French city of Lyon on Saturday, as the country was still recovering from a deadly attack on the church days earlier.
Nikolaos Kakavelaki, 52, was closing his Lyon church in the middle of the afternoon when he was attacked and is now in serious condition in hospital, said a police source who asked not to be named.
The attacker fled the scene, but the Lyon prosecutor later announced that a suspect had been arrested.
“A person who could match the description given by the initial witnesses has been taken into police custody,” said prosecutor Nicolas Jacquet, adding that the suspect was not 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 investigation.
The motive for the attack was unclear.
“At this stage, no hypothesis is ruled out or favored,” Jacquet said.
But it comes at a time when France is already nervous after the murder of three people inside a church in Nice on Thursday and the beheading of a teacher earlier this month who had shown his class a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.
The Lyon prosecutor’s office said in a statement that witnesses, and a passing police patrol, heard gunshots and then “saw an individual fleeing and discovered a man with gunshot wounds at the back door of the church.”
Prosecutors said an investigation has been launched and that he remains “in close contact with the national counter-terrorism prosecution service.
The small, Art Deco-style Orthodox church is situated in a residential area of Lyon that was especially quiet due to new lockdown measures introduced in France on Friday to stop the growing coronavirus pandemic.
In Paris, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin opened a meeting of the crisis cell to consider the situation.
Abominable act
Archbishop Ieronymos, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, denounced a “horror that defies human logic.”
“Intolerant and fanatical extremists, fundamentalists of violence and death use religion as a bullet that targets the heart of freedom and especially the freedom of belief of others,” he told reporters in Athens.
The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, condemned “this new abominable act in Lyon”.
He added in a tweet that “in Europe, freedom of conscience is guaranteed for all and must be respected, violence is intolerable and must be condemned.”
The President of the EU Parliament, David Sassoli, said that “Europe will never bow to violence and terrorism.”
Saturday’s shooting comes after three people were killed in a knife attack inside a church in the southern city of Nice on Thursday.
A Tunisian suspect was shot and injured by the police near the scene of the attack.
Macron tries to calm tensions
France was already tense after the reissue in early September of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, followed by an attack in front of his old offices, the beheading of the teacher and the attack in Nice.
After the teacher’s death, President Emmanuel Macron said that France would never renounce its laws allowing blasphemous cartoons, sparking protests across the Muslim world.
In an apparent attempt to reach out to Muslims, Macron on Saturday gave an interview with Qatar-based television channel Al-Jazeera, in which he said he understood that Muhammad’s cartoons could be shocking.
He also attacked the “lies” that the French state was behind the cartoons, and said that “in my country I will always defend the freedom to speak, write, think, draw.
Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned that French citizens face a security risk “wherever they are”, saying alerts have been sent to all French citizens abroad.
Prime Minister Jean Castex spoke of “the determination of the government to allow each and everyone to practice their worship in complete safety and in complete freedom.”
He was speaking in the northwestern city of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, where a Catholic priest was killed in an Islamist attack in 2016.
France entered a second coronavirus lockdown on Friday, but the government has exempted places of worship until Monday, allowing them to celebrate Christian All Saints’ Day on Sunday.
After the deadly attack in Nice, Macron announced increased surveillance of churches by the French military force in the streets, which will be reinforced to 7,000 soldiers out of 3,000.
