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24-09-2025
PARIS: On an early September morning, a pig’s head, covered in blood, was discovered at the doorstep of the Javel mosque in the heart of Paris. On it, a name had been scrawled in blue ink: Macron.
A couple of kilometers (about a mile) from the Eiffel Tower, the mosque is a place of worship for a diverse community of Muslims with Lebanese, Algerian, Iranian and other roots, which has long coexisted with neighbors in a leafy district of the French capital.
“It’s the first time something like this has ever happened to us,” Najat Benali, the mosque’s rector, told media.
That Tuesday, September 9, worshippers heading in for the dawn prayer discovered the act of desecration. Muslims are forbidden from eating pork and consider pigs to be unclean.
The worshippers called Benali, who rushed to the site.
“They were in a state of shock,” Benali said. When something like that happens, “naturally, you check your surroundings.”
When police arrived, Benali learned that the Javel mosque was not the only one to have been targeted.
In total, nine severed pig heads had been scattered on the doorsteps of mosques across Paris and its nearby suburbs, in what French authorities are investigating as an act of foreign interference.
“One cannot help but draw parallels with previous actions which have been proven to be acts of foreign interference,” said Laurent Nunez, Paris’s police prefect, at a news conference.
According to the Paris prosecutor’s office, 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 Monday, September 8.
CCTV footage later shows them arriving in Paris’s Oberkampf neighborhood. After depositing the pigs’ heads in front of the nine mosques, the vehicle then crossed the French border with Belgium early on Tuesday.
“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 wrote in a statement shared with media.
“The aim is to unsettle our fellow citizens, ultimately raising questions about the country we live in, about their safety, and then, of course, creating divisions between communities,” Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said.
‘It hurts me’
At the Islah mosque in Montreuil, an eastern Parisian suburb, Haider Rassool pulled up video surveillance footage on his phone.
In the video, a man wearing a sweatshirt can be seen placing a pig’s head to the left of the mosque’s entrance before taking a picture of his suspected crime.
“We were very concerned at first,” Rassool told media. “It’s a calm neighborhood, we get along with our neighbors. When we learned that we weren’t the only mosque to be targeted, it’s not that we were reassured, but at least we knew it wasn’t an act of personal revenge.”
Still, the incidents come at a moment when hate crimes against Muslims are rising in France. France registered 145 Islamophobic acts in the first five months of 2025, a 75 percent increase compared with the same period the previous year. Recent acts include attempted arson, threats and even killings, such as the May murder of Malian Aboubakar Cisse. (Int’l News Desk)
