Screenshot from a video posted on October 5, 2020, on the YouTube channel Light2tube, showing the town of Velika Plana, Serbia. LEMONDEFR/YOUTUBE
Quietly delivered as part of a plea bargain, the verdict was revealed on Friday, March 6, by the Balkan branch of the news outlet Radio Free Europe. Three Serbian nationals were found guilty of depositing pig heads in front of nine mosques in the Paris region in September 2025, and were convicted at the end of December by the high court in Smederevo, a small town about 50 kilometers to the East of Belgrade, for espionage and racial discrimination.
Serbian authorities also convicted the men for having participated in the act of throwing green paint on the Shoah Memorial and on three Parisian synagogues in May 2025. Both actions provoked a significant outcry and a wave of indignation in France before being attributed to Russia by French intelligence services. The verdict, which Le Monde also reviewed, confirmed that the group "received orders and financial resources from structures within the intelligence services of the Russian Federation."
All three of the men are originally from the same small town of Velika Plana (population 15,000), and identified themselves as an unemployed worker, a laboratory technician and a waiter. They were recruited and sent to France for a few thousand euros by a man referred to as "Hunter" in the verdict, who, according to a Mediapart investigation, is actually a Serb named Aleksandar Savic. While his current whereabouts are unknown, his recruits were sentenced to between six and 18 months of house arrest with electronic monitoring. In addition, eight other individuals remain under investigation.
