Authorities have arrested a suspect after an attacker armed with a sawn-off shotgun shot and seriously wounded a Greek Orthodox priest in the French city of Lyon, local media reported.
The priest was closing his church when the attack happened and is now in a serious condition in hospital, a source who requested anonymity, said.
Fifty-two-year-old Nikolaos Kakavelakis was shot twice in the stomach and had been able to tell responding emergency personnel as they arrived that he had not recognized the gunman.
The attack comes at a time when French authorities are already investigating the murder of three people inside a church and the decapitating of a school teacher who showed a class a caricature of the prophet Mohammed. Sources said Kakavelakis was shot in the liver at point-blank range.
Police have yet to determine the motive behind the attack, but it came in the midst of multiple gruesome Islamist attacks on French soil and escalating friction between the country and the Muslim world.
According to public prosecutor Nicolas Jacquet, any individual who could "correspond to the description given by the initial witnesses has been placed in police custody," DW News quoted him as saying in a statement, adding that the suspect was not in possession of a weapon when he was arrested.
France has beefed up security across the nation following the attacks, and ministers and local officials had warned more were likely. On Friday, President Emmanuel Macron announced that the government's threat alert had been put on the highest level.
Macron said an additional 4,000 military personnel were being deployed across France as part of Operation Sentinelle, bringing the total number of soldiers mobilized to 7,000. Security was also heightened at churches and other religious locations before All Saints' Day, on Sunday.
France was already on heightened alert following the republication in early September of caricatures of the prophet Mohammed by the French satirical Charlie Hebdo weekly. Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has warned French citizens to be vigilant in the midst of a growing security risk, saying all French nationals overseas had also been alerted.
The attacks set the stage for a heated debate that pits France's rigid secularism and free speech policies against Islam's religious sensitivities. "I can understand that people could be shocked by the drawings but I'll never accept that violence can be justified," the Telegraph quoted Marcon as saying.
