'A heinous attack': Macron condemns French mosque shooting by former far-right candidate
An 84-year-old former candidate for
France's ultra-right party shot and seriously wounded two men in their 70s who
saw him trying to burn a mosque in southwest France, police said, as the
government expressed "solidarity" with Muslims.
The octogenarian opened fire when the two men, aged 74 and 78, came upon him trying to set fire to the mosque's door on Monday afternoon, the police department said in a statement.
The victims were brought to a nearby hospital with serious injuries, while the suspected shooter was later arrested near his home.
The mosque has been cordoned off for investigations.
Police identified the man as Claude Sinke, and said he had admitted to being the shooter.
Sinke stood as a candidate for Marine' le Pen's National Front in 2015 regional elections, according to the official list.
President Emmanuel Macron "firmly condemned" what he described as a "heinous" attack.
"The Republic will never tolerate hatred," the president tweeted.
"Everything will be done to punish the perpetrators and protect our Muslim compatriots. I commit myself to it."
Interior Minister Christophe Castaner offered his "solidarity and support to the Muslim community" after the incident.
In a tweet, Castaner said the events "pain every one of us" and said he shared the "shock and horror" Muslims must be feeling.
Le Pen, for her part, spoke of an "attack" and described it as "an unspeakable act".
The man's actions were "absolutely contrary to the values of our movement," she tweeted.
The incident came just hours after Macron had urged France's Muslim community to step up the fight against "separatism" in the wake of the latest attack by an Islamist 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 gunman wounded an imam in a shooting at a mosque in the northwestern city of Brest, but police 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 gunman 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 in 2015 by Islamist radicals. Dozens of mosques were attacked by arsonists, others with firebombs, grenades or gunfire.
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The octogenarian opened fire when the two men, aged 74 and 78, came upon him trying to set fire to the mosque's door on Monday afternoon, the police department said in a statement.
The victims were brought to a nearby hospital with serious injuries, while the suspected shooter was later arrested near his home.
The mosque has been cordoned off for investigations.
The incident came just hours after Macron had urged France's Muslim community to step up the fight against "separatism" in the wake of the latest attack by an Islamist 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 gunman wounded an imam in a shooting at a mosque in the northwestern city of Brest, but police 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 gunman 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 in 2015 by Islamist radicals. Dozens of mosques were attacked by arsonists, others with firebombs, grenades or gunfire.
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