France:French authorities said yesterday they feared a serial killer was operating in Paris after a gunman shot dead a woman in a suburb with a gun used in three other killings in the same area since November.
“This series of killings deserves our maximum attention and we are putting all our resources into this affair,” interior minister Claude Guéant told Europe 1 radio. The same 7.65mm semi-automatic pistol was used in each of the four shootings, prosecutors said.
The latest shooting took place on Thursday when a gunman on a motorbike struck.
Marie-Suzanne Le Queau, a public prosecutor in Evry, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, said the common thread of the pistol was “not enough to affirm at this stage that it is all part of the same affair”.
There were obvious similarities in the way the latest three killings were carried out in February, March and this month, but no clear link to that in November, she added.
About 100 investigators were on the case and police were examining several leads.
– (Reuters)