A person stole a sacred Quran from a mosque near the French city of Lyon and set it on fire, religious leaders and a police source said on Tuesday.
On Sunday night to Monday, “an individual with a discovered face entered the prayer room, grabbed a copy of the Sacred Koran, set it on fire and then dropped it out of the building before fleeing,” said the Mosquas Council in the Rhone region.
The police source said an investigation had begun at the incident.
The attack occurs after a man who had published racist videos shunned his Tunisian neighbor and seriously injured a Turkish man in the southern city of Puget-Sur-Argens on Saturday.
The alleged murderer, a Frenchman born in 1971, fled the scene in a car, but was arrested not far after his partner alerted the police.
According Le Parisien The newspaper, the suspect, said that “he swore loyalty to the French flag” and asked the French to “shoot” people of foreign origin in one of their videos published on social networks.
Anti -terrorist prosecutors have taken care of the investigation into the case, the first racist attack as related to the end of being treated as “terrorism” since its office was created in 2019.
In a separate incident in April, a man stabbed a Malian man in a mosque in April, being a case managed by regional prosecutors.
France is home to the largest Muslim community in the European Union, as well as the largest Jewish population outside Israel and the United States.
There has also been an increase in the attacks reported against the members of the Jewish community of France since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli army responded with a devastating military offensive in the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 54,000 people.
The Holocaust Memorial of France and Tres Synagogas of Paris and a restaurant were destroyed with paint overnight on Saturday.
A man born in the Turk who burned a sacred Quran in London was declared guilty of a crime of public order with religious worsening.
Sweden has seen a series of burns of the sacred book, especially by the Iraqi Christian Sallan Momika. He was shot dead in January.
