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French police have released a suspect who was arrested after the shooting of a Greek Orthodox priest in Lyon, and said the gunman is still at large.
According to the Lyon prosecutor’s office, the man who was arrested shortly after the shooting on saturday he was released because the police found no evidence of his involvement.
The priest, Nikolas Kakavelakis, 45, a father of two, was shot twice as he closed the church at around 4 p.m. He remains in critical condition.
According to the Holy Greek Orthodox Diocese of France, the victim was scheduled to return to Greece after working in the church in Lyon where he was shot.
“We pray for a speedy recovery and unequivocally condemn all forms of violence,” the diocese said in a statement.
The motive for the shooting is not yet known. It is not being investigated by counter-terrorism prosecutors and the Lyon prosecutor’s office treats it as an attempted murder investigation.
Police cordons around the church were removed on Sunday and the search area was expanded to the wider Lyon area, according to the national police service.
Follow a high security alert throughout France by following the murder of three people in a church in Nice on Thursday, amid global tensions over cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad published in a French newspaper.
The shooting also came amid tensions within Lyon’s Greek Orthodox community.
The victim is understood to have had a long-standing legal dispute with a former monk who was convicted of defamation, according to French media reports.
The shooting took place amid a heightened security alert in France.
The head of the Greek Orthodox Church in France, Emmanuel Adamakis, told French radio station Europe 1 that Kakavelakis had been relieved of his duties to perform services in Lyon and “had been asked to return to Greece.”
The attack appeared to have taken place in a small courtyard at the rear of the church, where the priest had been living in an official church apartment, Adamakis said.
Antoine Callot, pastor of another Greek Orthodox church in Lyon, said the Greek Orthodox community in the city had not received any threats, but added that they had asked the police for security protection at their church after the shooting on Saturday.
