Maizières-lès-Metz: a woman in police custody after the desecration of nearly 100 graves

A 32-year-old woman was taken into police custody on Tuesday, suspected of having damaged nearly a hundred Catholic tombs in a cemetery in Maizières-lès-Metz (Moselle), announced the public prosecutor, David Touvet. Around 6:50 a.m. Tuesday morning, local residents alerted the gendarmerie, indicating that graves had been defaced in the old cemetery of this town of 11,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Metz, the magistrate said in a press release.

Damage to nearly 100 graves

They say they saw a woman carrying out these damage before leaving the cemetery. During the findings, investigators discovered damage to 96 graves. “Crosses and crucifixes placed or sealed on the graves had been damaged and broken, and grouped on the ground in various places in the cemetery,” according to David Touvet. A flagrant investigation was opened on the grounds of “violation or desecration of a grave or monument built in memory of the dead, committed because of the true or supposed belonging of the deceased to a specific religion”.

It was at 2:45 p.m. Tuesday that a 32-year-old woman finally presented herself spontaneously to the police still on the scene, at the cemetery, and declared having committed the damage. She was “immediately taken into custody”.

The mayor (LR) of Maizières-lès-Metz, Julien Freyburger, expressed on social networks his “indignation” at this “scandalous act” directed according to him “against a clear target, the Catholic religion, whose symbols were targeted precisely and systematically”. “I condemn with the greatest firmness this cowardly vandalism of rare violence,” he added, wishing for the “exemplary condemnation” of the author(s).

These facts come less than two weeks before the arrival of Pope Leo XIV in Metz, on September 28.