LYON (France), June 4 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A man suspected of stealing a Koran from a mosque near the French city of Lyon and then burning it was arrested on Tuesday evening, the public prosecutor’s office said.
He was arrested in the town of Villeurbanne, where the mosque was also located, and is said to be “psychologically fragile”, the prosecutor’s office and a police source said.
On the night of Sunday to Monday, “an individual with an uncovered face entered the prayer room, grabbed a copy of the Koran, set it on fire then dropped it outside the building before fleeing”, the council of mosques in the Rhone region said.
A police source said an investigation had begun into the incident.
The Lyon prosecutor’s office said that police were looking into a case of “damage or deterioration by means dangerous to people, committed on the grounds of race, ethnicity, nation or religion”.
The incident came after a man who had posted racist videos shot dead his Tunisian neighbour and badly wounded a Turkish man in the southern town of Puget-sur-Argens on Saturday.
The suspected killer, a Frenchman born in 1971, fled the scene in a car but was arrested not far away after his partner alerted police.
According to Le Parisien newspaper, the suspect said he “swore allegiance to the French flag” and called on the French to “shoot” people of foreign origin in one of his videos posted on social media.
Anti-terrorism prosecutors have taken over the investigation into the case, the first such racist attack linked to the far right to be dealt with as “terrorism” since their office was set up in 2019.
In a separate incident in April, a man stabbed a Malian man to death in a mosque, a case being handled 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 a rise in reported attacks against members of France’s Jewish community since Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and the Israeli military responded with a devastating military offensive on the Gaza Strip.
France’s Holocaust memorial and three Paris synagogues and a restaurant were vandalised with paint overnight on Saturday.
A Turkish-born man who burned a Koran in London was on Monday found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence.
Sweden has seen a series of burnings of the Islamic holy book, most notably by Iraqi Christian Salwan Momika. He was shot dead in January. — NNN-AGENCIES
