French police search for gunman after killing at monks' retirement home

29.05.2020 01:46

Hunt continues near Montpellier for armed man who killed woman, as investigators say there is no evidence of terror link and other residents are safe.

French police are searching for a masked armed man who burst into a retirement home for missionaries near Montpellier in southern France on Thursday night and killed one woman before fleeing.

The residents of the home in Montferrier-sur-Lez in the Hérault were safe but the police search is ongoing.

Investigators said they had no evidence at this stage to suggest the attack was terror-related. The man was not known to authorities, they said.

"For the time being, there is only one victim,” Montpellier prosecutor Christophe Barret told Agence France-Presse. "For the moment there is no particular evidence about the motive for this crime.”

Barret told reporters that a woman who works at the retirement home called police on Thursday night to say she had been attacked. When the officers arrived, they found the body of another woman, gagged and tied up outside the building with three stab wounds, the gendarme spokesman said.

It is thought the woman was a resident of the three-storey retirement home.

The worker who alerted police did not suffer serious injuries but was deeply rattled, and no one else at the residence was harmed, the prosecutor said in televised remarks carried on the website of Midi Libre newspaper.

Residents of the home "are very elderly, with an average age of 75, although some are more than 90”, said Alain Berthet, a local councillor in Montferrier-sur-Luz. Many of the residents require assistance to walk, he said.

The secretary general of the French Bishops’ Conference, Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, said in a Twitter message: "Our prayers tonight go to the woman who lost her life in this attack on a retirement home.”

Officers stand guard along a security area near a retirement home for Catholic missionaries in Montferrier-sur-Lez. Photograph: Alexandre Dinou/EPA

There were about 60 residents, who included nuns and former missionaries as well as monks.

The Paris anti-terrorist investigations unit is not running the investigation at this point. Local police referred to a "criminal act”.

Around two hours after the attacker burst into the home, more than a dozen police and emergency vehicles lined the roads near the home, while police set up roadblocks to check vehicles passing through the area.

A large security perimeter, stretching for several hundred metres, had been set up and officers from elite armed unit RAID were on the scene.

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