A group of around a dozen people in the French department of Essonne are accused of beheading animals in a home to ward off “demons” on Christmas Day, with one man arrested.
The group, said to be of Turkish origin, are accused of killing several animals in a house in Corbeil-Essonnes on Christmas Day after neighbours heard the sound of their cries. Two sheep were later discovered hung upside down, decapitated.
A 33-year-old was arrested in connection with the killing of the animals and transporting them, the newspaper Le Parisien reports.
According to police, the sheep were killed in order to rid the home of “jinn,” an Islamic term for evil spirits or demons, roughly speaking.
The prosecutor’s office of Evry-Courcouronnes stated the suspect is being charged with slaughtering an animal without stunning and outside a slaughterhouse in illegal conditions.
The dead sheep were disposed of, while another animal found at the scene, a goat, was taken to a local animal shelter.
Illegal animal slaughter by Muslims has been a problem in Western Europe for years, particularly around the time of the Islamic festival Eid al-Adha each year.
In 2018, French police seized 32 sheep that were found in the garage of a pizzeria in the no-go Paris suburb of Sine-Saint-Denis ahead of the festival that would have likely been illegally slaughtered.
In 2020, a Muslim in Nantes filmed himself slitting the throat of a sheep in the bathtub of his home and posted the footage on social media platform Snapchat.
The following year, a group of four men were arrested in the same city after allegedly slaughtering sheep illegally on the street and hanging the animals on a fence.
Police later discovered another sheep that had yet to be slaughtered and handed it over to a local animal welfare shelter.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.
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