Serbia arrests 11 over pigs’ heads placed at French mosques ‘on orders of foreign intelligence’

French investigators identified vehicle with Serbian licence plates near sites

French police officers outside the Grand Mosque of Paris. AFP

Serbia has arrested 11 people on suspicion of carrying out hate-motivated acts in France and Germany on the orders of a foreign intelligence service.

They are accused of placing pigs' heads outside nine mosques, which sparked outrage and alarm over rising anti-Muslim hatred, the Serbian foreign intelligence service said.

Some were tagged with French President Emmanuel Macron's name. Jewish sites in and around Paris were also defaced this month, including some with stickers bearing “genocidal” content.

Those arrested are also suspected of throwing green paint on a Holocaust memorial, several synagogues and a Jewish restaurant, all in Paris, and placing concrete “skeletons” in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

The suspects were trained in Serbia and are all Serbian, the interior ministry said.

A 12th suspect, identified by the initials MG, is suspected of training them “on the instructions of a foreign intelligence service” and is on the run, it said.

“Their goal was also to spread ideas that advocate and incite hatred, discrimination and violence based on differences in the aforementioned personal characteristics of certain groups of people,” the ministry added.

It did not identify the foreign intelligence service suspected of ordering the training, or the nationality of the fugitive suspect.

A mosque in the Parisian suburb city of Montrouge where pigs' heads were discovered. AFP

A police investigation in France found that the pig heads had been placed there by foreign nationals who immediately left the country.

French investigators quickly identified a vehicle with Serbian licence plates and a Croatian phone number linked to the crimes near the mosques.

They were arrested in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, and in Velika Plana, a town about 100km to the south, in co-ordination with the security services.

All crimes were committed from April to September 2025, the ministry said.

It added that the group of 11 will be brought before the prosecutor on offences including racial discrimination and espionage.

France is home to the world's largest Jewish population outside Israel and the US, as well as a substantial Muslim community sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

French authorities have carried out a series of investigations in recent years into acts of vandalism linked to foreign interference, with many observers pointing the finger at Moscow. Those attacks have often been aimed at the country's Jewish and Muslim communities, at a time of heightened tension over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Several EU nations have reported a surge in both anti-Muslim hatred and anti-Semitism since the beginning of the war in October 2023, according to the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights.

Serbia, which aims to join the EU, has close relations with Russia and is the only European country that has not introduced sanctions on Moscow.