NOUAKCHOTT  - Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz flew to Paris for medical treatment on Sunday after being wounded when soldiers ‘accidentally’ shot at his convoy as he returned to the capital Nouakchott from a weekend retreat.A pale-looking Ould Abdel Aziz, who has previously been targeted by Al-Qaeda-linked Islamists, appeared on television from his hospital bed before flying out of the country, telling Mauritanians that surgery carried out after Saturday’s shooting had been a ‘success’.“I want to reassure them about my health after this incident, which was committed in error by a military unit,” he said.“Thanks to God, there is no problem,” added the president, who was joined at his bedside by his Prime Minister Moulaye Ould Mohamed Laghdhaf and top civilian and military figures. Foreign Minister Hamadi Ould Hamadi said the shooting had no political impact in the impoverished northwest African nation.The president “is exercising the full range of his powers. He is absent, that happens sometimes: he travels to summits, he goes to conferences. The state is functioning,” Ould Hamadi told reporters on the sidelines of the Francophone summit in Kinshasa. “There is no particular problem which requires any particular arrangements,” he said, describing the situation in Mauritania as ‘calm’.A security source had earlier told AFP that the president, a former general who has been in power since leading an August 2008 military coup, had been directly targeted in Saturday’s incident. But Communications Minister Hamdi Mahjoub played down the shooting, saying 55-year-old Ould Abdel Aziz was only “slightly wounded” and that the soldiers had not realised it was the presidential convoy.“This was an accidental shooting on the presidential convoy as it returned to Nouakchott. The army unit did not recognise the presidential convoy,” Mahjoub said on national television.Ould Hamadi said the unit was a mobile army checkpoint that had not been informed of the convoy’s passage.The president was flown to Paris for medical treatment at a specialist hospital after undergoing the operation at a military hospital to remove a bullet, a security source told AFP on condition of anonymity.The source did not specify where the bullet had lodged but said none of his vital organs had been hit and “his life is not in danger”.