A gunman shot and gravely wounded an exiled Azeri journalist, Rahim Namazov, in a suburb of Toulouse in southern France on Friday, a police source said, Reuters reports.
Namazov fled to France from Azerbaijan in 2010. In a video posted on YouTube in December that year, Namazov said he was jailed after writing stories about brutality against soldiers in units of the Azeri military.
“Rahim Namazov is a journalist who had been tortured and imprisoned in his country and is a political refugee in France,” Karine Michelet-Traval, the mayor of Colomiers where the shooting occurred, told the La Depeche newspaper.
“You can’t help but think this was a settling of scores.”
Namazov’s wife was killed in the shooting, Michelet-Traval told the newspaper.