Police seal off area and make an arrest after Greek Orthodox cleric is seriously hurt in Lyon shotgun attack

French police were hunting a gunman who shot and seriously injured a Greek Orthodox priest in the city of Lyon yesterday afternoon.

The latest attack came two days after a terrorist killed three people at a church in Nice and two weeks after the beheading of a high school teacher.

Police and soldiers immediately sealed off Lyon’s 7th arrondissement in the hunt for the gunman and later made an arrest. The priest, said to be a Greek national aged 52, was closing the church when the man armed with a sawn-off shotgun fired at him several times, hitting him twice in the stomach.

French TV is reporting that it seems to be a “personal dispute”. Police are saying they are looking at all motives, but are advising journalists not to jump to conclusions that the incident is “terror” linked, despite the tensions and high level of alert in France.

On Saturday, French anti-terrorist police were still questioning three men in connection with the Nice attack as they tried to piece together the killer’s movements and establish if he had accomplices.

A man, aged 47, who was taken into police custody hours after the attack on Thursday and was reported to have been in contact with knifeman Brahim Issaoui the previous day, is still being held. Investigators gave no more details of the arrests of two other men aged 33 and 35.

Issaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian who killed the three people at the city’s Notre Dame basilica, remains in a serious condition in hospital after being shot by police inside the church. Issaoui was originally named as Aouissaoui based on an Italian Red Cross document he was carrying, but his correct identity was confirmed by his family at Bou Hajla near Sfax in Tunisia.

Over the weekend, shocked and grieving locals continued to lay flowers outside the Notre Dame de l’Assomption basilica. In the crowds, one woman’s cry rose like a collective wail: “Why us? Why us again?”

It was a sentiment echoed across France. The Nice killings hit a country already reeling from the beheading of a history teacher outside his high school near Paris less than two weeks before. Samuel Paty, 47, had shown pupils two caricatures of the prophet Muhammad as part of a discussion on free speech. The reprinting of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons has provoked a wave of anti-French protests in Islamic countries, and France has been on high alert.

On Saturday, President Emmanuel Macron tried to calm anti-French protests in a 55-minute interview with Al Jazeera. Macron said he “understands the feelings of Muslims about the caricatures” of the prophet. “The caricatures are not a government project but rather the product of free and independent newspapers that are not affiliated with the government.”

He added: “I think the reactions were due to lies and misrepresentation and because people think I am in favour of these caricatures.”