Police have arrested a suspect after a gunman shot and seriously injured a Greek Orthodox priest

Police have arrested a suspect after a gunman shot and seriously injured a Greek Orthodox priest in the French city of Lyon, local media have reported.

The priest, named by French media as Nikolaos Kakavelakis, was shot at twice and seriously injured in the stomach at about 4pm local time on Saturday as he was closing the church in the city’s seventh arrondissement, police said.

The Lyon newspaper Le Progrès and other local media reported that a man answering a police description of the alleged attacker had been arrested soon after 7pm in a kebab shop in the city. There was no immediate confirmation he was the suspected attacker.

Christos Koutsiouris, who is a member of the board of the Greek community of Lyon and for a number of years as a chanter 

in the church of the Annunciation, where Nikolaos Kakavelakis was pastor revealed that.

"I do not know who committed this crime. All I know is that last Sunday Father Nikolaos told me that he was jogging on the banks of the Rhone and that five Algerians or Moroccans surrounded him, made fun of him and in the end beat him and took his cross. He was very scared because he had money and a phone on him and let them go. "Maybe they have stigmatized him since then", Christos Koutsiouris reveals to euronews media outlet.