Paris, France – On a crisp morning in early September, a shocking scene unfolded at the entrance of the Javel mosque in central Paris: a pig’s head, stained with blood, was left on the doorstep. Scrawled across it in blue ink was the name “Macron.”
Located just a short distance from the iconic Eiffel Tower, this mosque serves a vibrant Muslim community composed of individuals with Lebanese, Algerian, Iranian, and other diverse backgrounds. For years, this place of worship has peacefully coexisted within a tranquil neighborhood of the French capital.
“This is unprecedented for us,” Najat Benali, the mosque’s rector, shared with Al Jazeera English.
That Tuesday, September 9, early morning worshippers arriving for dawn prayers were met with this disturbing act of desecration. Given that pork is forbidden in Islam and pigs are considered impure, the gesture was deeply offensive.
Upon being alerted, Benali hurried to the mosque. “The community was visibly shaken,” she recounted. “In moments like these, you instinctively become alert to your surroundings.”
Police soon arrived, revealing that the Javel mosque was not the sole target.
Authorities discovered that nine pig heads had been deliberately placed outside mosques throughout Paris and its suburbs. French officials are treating this as a case of foreign interference.
“It’s impossible not to link this to previous police-command-denies-sealing-pdp-secretariat/” title=”FCT … command denies sealing PDP Secretariat”>incidents confirmed as foreign provocations,” stated Laurent Nunez, the police prefect of Paris, during a press briefing.
Investigations by the Paris prosecutor’s office uncovered that two individuals, driving a vehicle registered in Serbia, purchased approximately ten pig heads from a farmer in Normandy on the evening of September 8.
Security camera footage later captured their arrival in the Oberkampf district of Paris. After distributing the pig heads in front of nine mosques, the suspects crossed into Belgium early the next day.
“These pig heads were placed by foreign nationals who promptly fled the country, clearly aiming to sow discord within France,” the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office stated in a release provided to Al Jazeera.
“Their objective is to unsettle citizens, provoke doubts about safety, and ultimately drive wedges between communities,” explained Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau.
‘It Cuts Deep’
At the Islah mosque in Montreuil, a suburb east of Paris, Haider Rassool showed Al Jazeera footage from surveillance cameras on his phone.
The video depicts a man in a hoodie placing a pig’s head beside the mosque’s entrance before photographing his act.
“Initially, we were deeply worried,” Rassool said. “Our neighborhood is peaceful, and we have good relations with our neighbors. Learning that other mosques were targeted didn’t ease our fears, but it did confirm this wasn’t a personal attack.”
These incidents come amid a troubling rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes across France.
In the first five months of 2025 alone, 145 Islamophobic incidents were recorded-a 75% increase compared to the same period last year. These acts range from attempted arson and threats to violent murders, including the killing of Malian national Aboubakar Cisse in May.
Recent polling by IFOP, reported by the French newspaper Liberation, reveals that two-thirds of French Muslims have experienced racist behavior within the past five years.
“As someone with a Muslim father, this is deeply painful,” said Saphia Ait Ouarabi, a French anti-racism advocate. “I worry about reassuring my younger sisters and cousins who ask if they might be targeted. Many young women wearing headscarves at school express fear of attacks. It’s truly heartbreaking.”
Rim-Sarah Alouane, a legal expert and human rights scholar at the University of Toulouse Capitole, emphasized that foreign entities are exploiting “pre-existing fractures within French society.”
“They don’t need to create division; it already exists,” Alouane explained. “Their role is to manipulate these tensions, turning hate crimes into tools for geopolitical disruption.”
Since late 2023, French prosecutors have identified nine instances of foreign interference in Paris, often aimed at inciting religious animosity.
For example, in May 2024, red handprints were spray-painted on Paris’s Holocaust Memorial. That same month, three Serbian nationals were arrested in Antibes for vandalizing synagogues, a restaurant, and the memorial.
Back at the Javel mosque, Benali expressed resilience in the face of these provocations.
Shortly after the pig heads were found, religious leaders across Paris reached out to her.
“They said, ‘An attack on one Muslim is an attack on all of us’ … The intention was to divide us, to pit communities against each other. But they miscalculated.”
