A photographer was left fighting for his life yesterday after being shot by an intruder at the Paris offices of left-wing French daily Liberation, police and the newspaper said.
The 27-year-old victim was shot in the chest and stomach with a pump-action shotgun and was in a critical condition, they said. The shooter fled the scene and was still at large several hours after the attack, which occurred about 10:15am.
“I was just arriving for work and I saw a man lying on the ground, holding his stomach and with blood everywhere,” Liberation journalist Anastasia Vecrin said.
Police were quickly deployed at all media offices in Paris for fear of further attacks.
The shooting came three days after a man stormed into the Paris headquarters of news channel BFMTV brandishing a shotgun and warned a senior editor: “Next time, I will not miss you.”
Police are investigating a possible link between the two incidents.
Fabrice Rousselot, editor of Liberation, says witnesses reported the gunman said nothing during the brief time he was in the lobby.
Liberation executive Nicolas Demorand said the attack had left staff horrified.
“When you have someone with a shotgun coming into a newspaper’s offices in a democracy, it is very, very serious, whatever the mental state of the person,” Demorand said. “If papers and other media have to become bunkers, something has gone wrong in our society.”
The newspaper said the injured man worked as an assistant to one of the photographers for Next, a supplement of the newspaper.
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