Vandals have daubed swastikas and anti-Islam slogans on 500 graves of French Muslim war veterans in an attack that French president Nicolas Sarkozy condemned as "revolting." Some 20 Jewish tombstones nearby were also desecrated. It was the third time over the past two years that Muslim tombstones were desecrated at the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette cemetery, one of the nation's biggest military graveyards, in northern France. About 500 of the 576 Muslim graves were defaced on Sunday, the eve of Islam's Eid al-Adha feast, and the damage was discovered early on Monday by a passerby, state prosecutor Jean-Pierre Valensi said.
Sarkozy denounced the latest outrage as "abject and revolting" and said it was "the expression of a repugnant racism directed against the Muslim community of France." The president ordered that the perpetrators be quickly found and brought to justice "with the full severity that this requires." In the latest attack, swastikas and slogans insulting the Prophet Mohammed and France's justice minister Rachida Dati were painted on graves. "At first glance, this looks very much like the previous desecration", said Valensi.
In April, vandals desecrated 148 Muslim graves, hanging a pig's head from one tombstone and again taunting Dati, who is of North African descent.
The anti-racism group SOS Racisme called on authorities to dismantle "the small groups that are active in the region" and said prosecutors from various regions must coordinate efforts to end the attacks. Two young men with neo-Nazi sympathies are awaiting trial over April's desecration. They deny involvement. One of the two has already been convicted for the desecration of 52 Muslim graves at the cemetery a year earlier, in April 2007.
Security has been increased at the cemetery, especially around religious holidays, but police said they had detected nothing out of the ordinary during regular patrol of the area at midnight. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette cemetery, near the town of Arras, holds the graves of 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 site houses the remains of about 40,000 soldiers, half of them in named graves, and also includes an ossuary with the bones of thousands more, a basilica and a museum.
