A pig’s head, covered in blood, scrawled in blue ink with the name “Macron”, was discovered at the doorstep of the Javel mosque in the heart of Paris on September 09, leaving Muslims shaken and on alert.
The mosque, a couple of kilometres away from the Eiffel Tower, serves a diverse community of Muslims with Lebanese, Algerian, Iranian backgrounds, coming to pray.
“It’s the first time something like this has ever happened to us…They [worshipphers] were in a state of shock,” the mosque’s rector Najat Benali told a news outlet.
Javel mosque was not the only one to have been targeted, as severed pig heads have been found on the doorsteps of mosques across Paris and its suburbs, in what French authorities are investigating as an act of foreign interference.
Recently, at a news conference, Paris’s Police prefect Laurent Nunez said, “One cannot help but draw parallels with previous actions which have been proven to be acts of foreign interference.”
Two individuals driving a car with Serbian licence plates approached a farmer in the northern region of Normandy to buy “about 10” pig’s heads on the evening of September 8, Paris prosecutor’s office has said.
Later, CCTV footage shows them arriving in Paris’s Oberkampf neighbourhood. The vehicle then crossed the French border with Belgium after depositing the pigs’ heads in front of the nine mosques.
“The pig heads left in front of mosques in the Paris region were placed there by foreign nationals who immediately left the country, with the clear intention of causing unrest within the nation,” the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccauau stated that the aim is to “unsettle our fellow citizens”, ultimately raising questions about the country they live in, about their safety, and then, creating divisions between communities.
Since late 2023, prosecutors have identified nine acts of foreign interference across the French capital, often, but not always, with the intent of inciting religious hatred.