Suspect arrested in shooting of priest in France's Lyon

A suspect is arrested after an attacker with a sawed-off shotgun shot a Greek Orthodox priest in the chest before fleeing in the French city of Lyon, a prosecutor said.

“A person who could correspond to the description given by the initial witnesses has been placed in police custody,” Lyon’s public prosecutor Nicolas Jacquet says in a statement, adding that the suspect was not carrying a weapon when he was arrested.

Other reports say the priest was shot in the abdomen with a hunting rifle.

The attack comes as France reels from two other killings by Islamic extremists and protests against cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

On Thursday, a Tunisian killed three people at a church in the southern city of Nice, and earlier this month, an extremist beheaded a schoolteacher for showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class discussion on free speech.

Earlier Saturday, before the attack, President Emmanuel Macron sought to calm flaring tensions with Muslims around the world, telling an Arab-world TV channel he understood that caricatures of Muhammad could be shocking, while lashing out at “lies” that say the French state was behind them.