France: Shooting in Lyon, Orthodox priest wounded by shotgun-armed attacker

In the latest in a spree of deadly incidents in France, an Orthodox priest has been seriously wounded by an attacker wielding a sawn-off shotgun in the city of Lyon on Saturday, AFP reported police sources as saying.

France’s Interior Ministry has tweeted saying a serious incident was underway, while police sources told AFP the suspect has fled the scene.

According to France, police say the priest was Greek and was closing the church when he was attacked at around 4pm.

Citizens have been urged to avoid the area as security forces are on the scene, located in Lyon’s seventh arrondissement. A massive manhunt for the perpetrator is now underway.

The attack comes as France grapples with the fallout of President Emmanuel Macron’s statements about Islam, which came in the aftermath of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, republishing its controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Macron, who said Islam is in crisis across the world, had come out in defence of France’s secular values and said France would never abandon its right to caricature. His statements sparked condemnation from the Muslim world, including implicit threats of violence from figures like Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia, who said “Muslims have the right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”.

Following Charlie Hebdo’s republishing of the cartoons on September 1, there have been three related terror attacks in France. On September 25, two were wounded in a stabbing outside the former headquarters of the magazine; on October 16, a teacher was beheaded in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine after he reportedly showed an image of the Prophet to his class; on October 29, three were killed in a stabbing attack at the Notre-Dame de Nice basilica in Nice.

One incident, which went viral on social media, showed large crowds on the streets of Lyon, allegedly of Turks searching for Armenians, in what is assumed to be related to the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Turkey-backed Azerbaijan. According to a French anti-racism group and an organization representing France’s Armenian community, as reported by Vice, the march was led by a Turkish ultra-nationalist group called the Grey Wolves. France is home to the third-largest Armenian community in the world. 

Macron has since said he “understands” why Muslims would be angered by caricatures of the Prophet, but says that violence will never be justified. His response to the third attack was to raise France's threat level to the highest. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned that French citizens face a security risk "wherever they are" and said alerts had been sent to all French nationals abroad.

The attack comes as France undergoes its second coronavirus-induced lockdown. While the lockdown began on Friday, places of worship had been exempted until Monday so that they could celebrate the Christian All Saint's Day on Sunday.