A Greek Orthodox priest has been shot and badly wounded at a church in the French city of Lyon by an assailant who then fled, police and witnesses say.<\/p>\n
The priest was fired on twice at about 4:00pm (local time) as he was closing the church, and was being treated for life-threatening injuries, the police source said.<\/p>\n
Witnesses said the church, in the centre of the city, was Greek Orthodox.<\/p>\n
Another police source said the priest, who was of Greek nationality, told emergency services he had not recognised his assailant.<\/p>\n
The attacker was alone and used a hunting rifle, said the official, who was not authorised to be publicly named.<\/p>\n
The assailant’s motive was not immediately clear.<\/p>\n
Police locked down the neighbourhood around the church and warned the public on Twitter to stay away.<\/p>\n
A Greek Government official identified the priest as Nikolaos Kakavelakis.<\/p>\n
A suspect was arrested several hours later at a kebab shop in Lyon and placed in police custody, the first police source said.<\/p>\n
There was no confirmation that the person was the suspected gunman, however, or if police were still looking for someone else.<\/p>\n
There was no indication from French officials that the attack was terrorism-related.<\/p>\n
The French anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office had not been brought in, as is normal when law enforcement officials suspect a terrorism link, France’s BFMTV broadcaster said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Greek Orthodox priest has been shot and badly wounded at a church in the French city of Lyon by an assailant who then fled, police and witnesses say. The priest was fired on twice at about 4:00pm (local time) as he was closing the church, and was being treated for life-threatening injuries, the police […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2959,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,48,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-incident","category-world"],"views":30,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2957"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2960,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions\/2960"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldinsight.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}