UPDATE: Marbella shooting victim on the Costa del Sol was French

THE victim of last night’s shooting in the Costa del Sol’s Marbella was a French man aged 60, Spanish police have revealed.

Witnesses reports two men in a blue Renault Megane were lying in wait as the victim walked back to his car from a restaurant next to the Cabopino campsite above Cabopino marina.

They opened fire, with up to five shots being heard, before speeding off towards the Calahonda toll booths on to the AP-7 road. There they crashed through a barrier before making their escape at about 8 pm. 

Police launched a hunt for the gunmen, who at time of going to press had still not been found. Their escape vehicle was discovered ablaze on the Calle de las Canteras above Mijas Pueblo. 

Back at the scene of the shooting forensic experts combed the site for clues while the victim’s body was transferred to the Institute of Legal Medicine (IML) in Malaga (Spain) for a post mortem examination. 

Police say that although no line of enquiry has been ruled out, first indications are that the shooting was a “settling of accounts” possibly in a gang-related crime. 

This is the third shooting death within a few kilometres of each other in the past few weeks. On November 22 Briton Peter Williamson died in a hail of bullets as he arrived home in Riviera del Sol, just a few hundred yards from the Calahonda toll booth where Tuesday’s gunmen made their dramatic escape. He was struck by five bullets including one to the heart. 

A week before that two men were shot on Marbella’s Andasol Urbanisation, with one, of Arab origin, killed outright and the other critically injured. 

Police believe both these shootings to have been drugs-related.