The Georgian who shot the Greek Orthodox priest in Lyon was jealous: the prelate was the lover of his wife, a Russian woman – International

Two days after the Nice bombing, almost everyone feared a new attack on the Christian religion, but the shooting at a Greek Orthodox priest in Lyon last week had not a religious motive, but an adulterous relationship: the unfaithful husband and – He acknowledged the facts, writes AFP.

The 40-year-old Georgian testified in pre-trial detention that he shot 52-year-old Greek priest Nikolaos Kakavelakis on Oct. 31 outside a church in the city.

“It turned out to be the husband of a woman who had an affair with the victim,” Lyon prosecutor Nicolas Jacquet said Saturday night, adding that the judicial police investigation “will continue to establish the exact motive and course of the facts”.

The magistrate specified that “the terrorist track is definitively eliminated.”

The victim, seriously wounded in the abdomen and chest, received two shots from a cut barrel rifle, came out of a coma this Tuesday, after undergoing surgery. His questioning by investigators led to the arrest of the attacker on Friday.

According to the newspaper Le Parisien, the victim was the one who directed the investigators towards her jealous husband. Orthodox priests do not take an oath of celibacy.

The suspect’s wife, a 30-year-old Russian woman, was questioned and confirmed adultery, according to the newspaper.

Nikolaos Kakavelakis’s aggression against the Greek Orthodox Church in the 7th district of Lyon, two days after the attack on the Nice church, was immediately perceived and condemned, in France and abroad, as a new terrorist attack.

Visiting Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray (north-west), where priest Hamel was assassinated in his church in 2016, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced “the complete decision of the government and the Republic to allow everyone to practice religion in complete safety and in complete freedom. “

“When will these anti-Christian attacks stop? How did France get here?” Asked Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, leader of a right-wing sovereignist party.

However, police and religious sources rushed to request caution regarding the motives for the attack in Lyon, in the absence of a complaint and taking into account the controversial personality of the victim, who had been in office for about ten years and had resigned a month before.

Living in the church accommodation, he had conflicting relationships with “three or four members of the community,” according to Georges Vassilakis, regional head of the Greek Orthodox Church in France.