A Dutch Jesuit priest was beaten and shot dead by unidentified gunmen at his monastery in the besieged Syrian city of Homs on Monday, the Vatican said. Frans van der Lugt, 75, who had been living in Syria since the early 1970s, was a man of great courage who had refused to leave the city despite the danger there, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said. "Father Frans was killed in the garden of our monastery," Rev. Ziad Hillal, a**ther Jesuit who lived there with the Dutch priest, told Vatican Radio.