French Prime Minister hurries back to Paris after Church shooting

French Prime Minister Jean Castex said Saturday he would immediately depart for Paris to attend a crisis meeting after a Greek Orthodox priest was shot at a church in the city of Lyon.

"The interior minister has set up a crisis response centre and I will immediately go to Paris to assess the situation," he said during a visit to the northern community of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.

The priest, a Greek national, was shot at by an unidentified assailant wielding a hunting rifle with a sawed-off barrel as he was closing the church in the afternoon, according to Le Parisien newspaper. The shooter is still at large.

The paper said the cause of the attack was unclear and the national counterterrorism prosecutor's office was looking into it. The shooting comes two days after an Islamist-motivated knife attack left three dead in a Catholic basilica in Nice. (/Sputnik)

( With inputs from ANI )

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