British war graves desecrated in France
Vandals daubed Nazi graffiti on British war graves in northern France, prompting a strong condemnation from President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday in a letter to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
Police said they found swastikas and other graffiti including “SS” and an obscene drawing in pink paint on a dozen graves of British soldiers at the northern cemetery of Loos-en-Gohelle, the site of a major World War I battle.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission sent a special team to clean the graves.
Sarkozy expressed “indignation and consternation” in a letter to the queen, branding the desecrations “all the more revolting” since they came a week before he visits London for a commemoration of French resistance during World War II.
“I condemn with the greatest firmness this horrible act and ask you to pass on my feelings of sympathy and solidarity, and those of the French people, to the families concerned and to all of the British people,” Sarkozy wrote.
Numerous desecrations of Jewish, Muslim and German graves have been reported in France in recent years.
However officials said the attack on the British graves did not seem to have been politically motivated.
“I think it is a marginal act, a bit of idiocy,” said the mayor of Loos, Jean-Francois Caron. “There are a few inscriptions about all kinds of different things.”…