Around the World: France

Cemetery vandalized

Vandals have desecrated several dozen graves in the Muslim section of a military cemetery near Arras in northern France, officials said yesterday.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon called the attack a "revolting act" and said those responsible would be found.

The desecration came almost exactly a year after youths daubed Nazi inscriptions and swastikas on Muslim tombs in the same Notre-Dame de Lorette cemetery in Ablain Saint-Nazaire.

Notre-Dame de Lorette is one of France's biggest World War I military cemeteries and was built on the site of a battlefield where many French and German soldiers died between October 1914 and October 1915.

(China Daily 04/07/2008 page6)