PARIS: Two elderly men were seriously wounded on Monday after they caught an assailant trying to burn a French mosque in Bayonne, police said, and the shooter-arsonist shot at them.
The assailant, an 84-year-old man, opened fire when the two men, aged 74 and 78, came upon him trying to set fire to the door of the Bayonne mosque in southwest France around 1400 GMT, the police department said in a statement.
The victims were brought to a nearby hospital with serious injuries, while the suspected octogenarian shooter was later arrested near his home and a firearm and a gas cannister recovered from his car. The mosque was cordoned off for investigations.
The 84-year-old suspect had far-right connections, according to a police source. A separate source, familiar with the situation, said the shooter had been a candidate for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party back in 2015.
The incident came just hours after President Emmanuel Macron had urged France’s Muslim community to step up the fight against “separatism” in the wake of the latest attack by a radical on French soil, in which a police employee stabbed four colleagues to death.
There have been intermittent attacks on mosques in France since 2007 when 148 Muslim headstones in a national military cemetery near Arras were smeared with anti-Islamic slurs and a pig’s head was placed among them.
In June this year, a shooter wounded an imam in a shooting at a mosque in the northwestern city of Brest but police had ruled out a terror motive.
In March, workers building a mosque in the small southwestern town of Bergerac found a pig’s head and animal blood at the entrance to the site — two weeks after a shooter killed 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in a shooting spree at two mosques.
Mosques were also targeted after the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine’s office in 2015 by radicals. Dozens of mosques were attacked by arsonists, others with firebombs, grenades or gunfire.
