Two days after an Islamic extremist knife attack at a Catholic church in Nice that saw three people killed, a Greek Orthodox priest was shot and seriously injured by a gunman.
The attack took place in Lyon while the priest, described by French media as 52-year-old Nicolas K. was locking up the church at around 4pm local time.
The priest who is a Greek citizen seconded in France suffered two wounds in the abdomen fired from a saw-off hunting riffle and is being treated at hospital, a police official told The Associated Press.
Police launched a manhunt, deploying significant armed forces on the site and surrounding areas.
“No theory is favoured, no theory is ruled out,” Lyon Mayor Gregory Doucet told reporters at the scene. “We don’t know at this stage the motive for this attack.”
This happens, amid ongoing geopolitical tensions due to a spate of radical Islamist attacks in the country still related to the infamous cartoons previously published in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
During last Thursday’s attack in Nice, a knife-wielding assailant beheaded two of the three victims while yelling “Allahu Akbar”.
The French Interior Ministry has described in an alert on Twitter an “ongoing situation” in those central areas and warned the public to avoid them and follow instructions from the authorities.
All this follows the murder of French teacher Samuel Paty, who had shown his students the infamous cartoons during a class on freedom of speech on 16 October.
The teacher was brutally beheaded by a teenage asylum seeker who had recently been awarded a residence permit. The suspect has since been described as an Islamist terrorist, Reuters reported.
Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron’s charged public responses to the attacks have caused more tension between France and the Muslim world. Many Muslims consider them blasphemous and “Islamophobic” pushing for protests while calling for the boycotting of French goods.