VERSAILLES, France -- Masked gunmen stormed the fashionable suburban home of a Libyan businessman and shot him to death, police said Tuesday.
Mohamed Bouzou, 54, was killed shortly before midnight Monday by a 7.65 mm caliber bullet in the chest. Other shots were fired but no one else was hurt, a police spokeswoman in Versailles said.
No one claimed responsibility for the shooting and police said they had no motive. Police officers said the shooting could have been a political assassination, a botched robbery attempt or a 'settling of accounts.'
A police source said a relative of the dead man had served as a minister in the government of the late King Idris of Libya, who was toppled in a military coup led by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 1969.
The police spokeswoman said authorities did not know if Bouzou was opposed to Gadhafi, who branded exiled Libyan dissidents 'stray dogs' in 1980 and ordered them to come home or face assassination. Following the murders of 11 Libyan exiles, Gadhafi claimed the campaign was over. Maj. Abdul Salaam Jalloud, considered the No. 2 man in Libya after Gadhafi, said recently that the killings of the 'stray dogs' had stopped because 'they are all dead.' The four or five masked gunmen, ignoring a 'beware of the dog' sign, carefully cut through a wire fence at the rear of the two-story house and burst into the kitchen, investigators said.
Bouzou, chairman of the SA Trame Export, an import-export company with its headquarters in the southern city of Nice, was shot as he came downstairs from his bedroom to investigate the noise, police said.
'I heard simply one gunshot and the cry of a woman,' said a neighbor in the chic Versailles suburb of Saint-Nom-La-Breteche. 'When I looked out of the window, I saw five shadows fleeing through the garden.'
His son ran up from the basement but did not catch sight of the gang before they fled, police said. A woman friend and a maid were also in the house, which Bouzou had used as a summer residence for five years.
'He was very courteous, he was a very quiet man,' a neighbor said. An official at the Libyan People's Bureau, Libya's equivalent of an embassy, in Paris said he was married with five children and had lived in France for more than 10 years.
Friends said Tuesday Bouzou had not received any threats and was not apparently under surveillance. The window in the front door to his home was smashed and a blood-soaked pillow lay at the foot of the stairs.
Nothing was reported stolen from the white-painted house.
