Paris, France – On an early September morning, a pig’s head, covered in blood, was discovered at the doorstep of the Javel mosque in the heart of Paris. 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.

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“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.

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CCTV footage later shows them arriving in Paris’s Oberkampf neighbourhood. After depositing the pigs’ heads in front of the nine mosques, the vehicle then crossed the French border with Belgium early on Tuesday.

“The pig heads left in front of mosques in the Paris region were placed there by foreign nationals who immediately left the country, with the clear intention of causing unrest within the nation,” the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office wrote in a statement shared with Al Jazeera.

“The aim is to unsettle our fellow citizens, ultimately raising questions about the country we live in, about their safety, and then, of course, creating divisions between communities,” Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said.

‘It hurts me’

At the Islah mosque in Montreuil, an eastern Parisian suburb, Haider Rassool pulled up video surveillance footage on his phone.

In the video, a man wearing a sweatshirt can be seen placing a pig’s head to the left of the mosque’s entrance before taking a picture of his suspected crime.

“We were very concerned at first,” Rassool told Al Jazeera. “It’s a calm neighbourhood – we get along with our neighbours. When we learned that we weren’t the only mosque to be targeted, it’s not that we were reassured, but at least we knew it wasn’t an act of personal revenge.”

Still, the incidents come at a moment when hate crimes against Muslims are rising in France.

France registered 145 Islamophobic acts in the first five months of 2025, a 75 percent increase compared with the same period the previous year. Recent acts include attempted arson, threats and even killings, such as the May murder of Malian Aboubakar Cisse.

New IFOP polling obtained by French newspaper Liberation shows that two in three French Muslims say they have been the victims of racist behaviour in the past five years.

“As someone with a Muslim father, it was just terrible, it hurts me personally,” Saphia Ait Ouarabi, a French antiracism activist, told Al Jazeera. “Like everyone else, I’m worried. It’s about reassuring my little sisters or my little cousins who ask me if something might happen to them. There are young women wearing headscarves that I meet at school who are afraid of being attacked. Honestly, it’s really hard.”

Rim-Sarah Alouane, a legal scholar and human rights researcher at the University of Toulouse Capitole, noted that foreign actors were capitalising on “already existing wounds in French society”.

“The point is that they don’t even need to create the division or the chaos; it’s already there,” Alouane said. “They only need to exploit it. This transforms a hate crime into a weapon of geopolitical disruption.”

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Since late 2023, prosecutors have identified nine acts of foreign interference across the French capital, often, but not always, with the intent of inciting religious hatred.

In May 2024, Paris’s Holocaust Memorial was graffitied with red handprints. That same month, three Serbians were arrested in the southern French city of Antibes in connection with the tagging of three synagogues, a restaurant and the Holocaust Memorial.

Back at the Javel mosque, Benali said communities cannot be destabilised with acts of vandalism.

Immediately after the pig’s heads were discovered, she was contacted by other religious leaders in Paris.

“[They said], ‘From the moment one Muslim is attacked, it’s like we’re all attacked’ … They wanted to destabilise us by pitting us against one another. Well, they were wrong.”