Two French soldiers were killed and another seriously wounded in a drive-by shooting near a military base in the south-western city of Montauban on Thursday, a state official told AFP. The locally based official said the shooting took place around 2:10 pm local time (1310 GMT) on a street not far from the base housing the 17th Parachute Engineering Regiment (RGP).
The dead French soldiers were aged 26 and 24, according to a police source. The wounded man, who is said to be in a critical condition, is 28. The state official said a scooter-rider, wearing a helmet with visor, opened fire on the three uniformed soldiers on a street near businesses, shops and a bank branch, then drove off at speed.
Investigators found 15 spent cartridges at the scene, police said. They are operating on the theory that the shooter was acting alone. The official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP it was not clear if the victims had been withdrawing money from the bank, but a television news report of the incident said that one of them had.
Authorities launched an extensive search for the gunman involving a large number of police and national gendarmes, the official said. The incident follows another shooting on Sunday that saw a 30-year-old soldier shot dead by an assailant on a motorcycle in a residential area of Toulouse, 46 kilometres (29 miles) south of Montauban.
Prosecutors said they were considering a number of possibilities in that shooting, in which the victim was an off-duty NCO from the 1st Parachute Logistics Regiment, including that it was the result of a personal dispute.
But police refused to say whether or not they believed there is a link between the two shootings. Thursday's victims were from a 1,000-strong unit of sappers specialised in mine and explosives clearance, breaching fortifications and urban warfare. In recent years the 17th RGP has often been deployed on operations in Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Balkans, having been founded in 1946 and then fighting in colonial wars in South East Asia and the UN action in Korea.