ORTHODOX PRIEST SEVERELY WOUNDED IN FRANCE SHOOTING

A Greek Orthodox priest was shot and wounded Saturday in the central French city of Lyon, but the motive was unclear, local authorities said.

The shooting comes at a time of heightened tensions in France, which is still on edge after a pair of recent attacks by Islamic extremists, the killing of three churchgoers in the southern city of Nice on Thursday and the beheading near Paris two weeks ago of a schoolteacher who had shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a civics class.

In Lyon, around 4 p.m. on Saturday, local residents and a police patrol heard two gunshots near a Greek Orthodox church in the 7th arrondissement of the city, the Lyon prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Police officers saw a man fleeing the scene and found a priest with gunshot wounds near the church’s back door, the statement said. French media reported that the attacker used a sawed-off shotgun.

Police apprehended a person matching witness descriptions of the attacker later Saturday, the prosecutor’s office said. A statement from the prosecutor’s office said that the person was not carrying a weapon and did not say that the person was a suspect in the shooting.

Grégory Doucet, the mayor of Lyon, said that the priest had been hospitalized with serious wounds.

“At this stage, no hypothesis is ruled out nor favored,” the prosecutor’s office said, adding that it had opened an investigation for attempted murder and that it was in touch with the national antiterrorism prosecutor’s office.

But the fact that the national anti-terrorism prosecutor was not directly overseeing the case was a sign that authorities did not have evidence of a terrorist motive.

French authorities had placed the country on its highest terrorism alert level after the attack in Nice.