ABLAIN-SAINT-NAZAIRE, France (AFP)
Neo-Nazi vandals desecrated 148 Muslim graves in France's biggest war cemetery and smeared racist slogans and hung a pig's head from one of the tombstones, officials said Sunday.
President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed "profound outrage" at the "sordid" attack on the Muslim quarter of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, near the northern town of Arras on Saturday night. He vowed that those responsible would be punished.
The attack came almost exactly a year after a similar incident in which neo-Nazi vandals scrawled swastikas on 52 of the cemetery's Muslim graves.
"This is the most inadmissible kind of racism and the president of the republic shares the pain of France's entire Muslim community," said a statement issued by the presidency. France's Muslim community is Europe's largest at around five million.
Muslim community leaders were allowed to visit the scene on Sunday. "This is shameful to see," said the regional head of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, Bahssine Saaidi.
The MRAP anti-racism group said the attack was "a worrying sign of an ill that is gaining ground with a degree of impunity: Islamophobia" and warned that France needed to face up to the problem.
The state prosecutor for Arras, Jean-Pierre Valensi, said "the slogans directly target Islam and they gravely insult Rachida Dati, the justice minister," who is the daughter of north African immigrants.
He said a pig's head was hung from one of the graves.
SOS Racism said it was taking legal action to demand the dismantling of the neo-Nazi group behind the April 2007 attack on the cemetery.
Two youths aged 18 and 21, both members of the group, were jailed for a year over that attack. A 16-year-old also received a six-week prison sentence.
Prior to 2007, there were four incidents involving the desecration of Muslim graves in northern and eastern France in 2004, and one in 2003.
The cemetery is France's biggest military graveyards and commemorates tens of thousands of victims of a series of long and bloody battles for control of northern France at the start of World War I.
Inaugurated in 1925, the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery houses the remains of some 40,000 soldiers, half of them in named graves. The Muslim quarter includes 576 tombs, grouped together and turned towards Mecca. |
