On it, a name had been scrawled in blue ink: Macron. A couple of kilometres (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 neighbours 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 Al Jazeera English.

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. (Aljazeera)