A counterterrorism investigating judge in France has ordered a trial at the Paris criminal court against a group of 16 people suspected of planning violent actions against Muslims in the country between 2017 and 2018, French news agency AFP reported on Wednesday.

In the ruling published on August 21, the judge described the Action des Forces Operationnelles (AFO) group as a “hierarchical and structured organization” whose aim was to carry out “concrete violent action projects in symbolic places such as mosques” or targeting halal food.

The 13 men and three women named in the court order are primarily accused of conspiracy to commit terrorist crimes and searching for weapons.

The group’s planned violent projects, which were sometimes merely declaratory in nature, included “the killing of 200 radicalized imams,” attacks on the rapper Medine or the preacher Tariq Ramadan, throwing grenades at “Arab cars” and “the remote detonation of a couscous machine.”

The order, seen by AFP, cites a document saying that the particularly active AFO cell in the French capital planned to “blow up” the door of a mosque in Clichy-la-Garenne, in the Paris region, and position “long-range shooters”.

The group also considered the possibility of using female members to poison halal food in supermarkets with a component of rat poison hidden under niqabs.

While the acts charged were initially classified as criminal, the investigating judge classified them as misdemeanors in May 2023 following a request from the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat).

This means the defendants will receive a shorter prison sentence and will be tried by a criminal court rather than a special jury court that specifically deals with terrorism and organized drug trafficking. Many of the defendants, born between 1949 and 1986, have a military background or have mentioned an interest in the army, according to AFP.

Among them are an antique dealer, a night telephone operator for a taxi company, a human resources consultant, a restaurateur, a craftsman, an accountant, an unemployed person and a teacher.

According to Pnat, the accused members of the group, which was disbanded in 2018, “largely denied having personally planned acts of violence.”

Increase in anti-Islamic acts since October 7

In recent years, several people with links to right-wing extremist groups have been convicted in Paris.

Six members of the Social Armies Organization, including its main representative Logan Nisin, were sentenced to prison terms of up to nine years at the end of 2021.

The appeal trial against the Barjols, whose three members were convicted in February 2023 of preparing violent actions, particularly against the head of state and migrants, is scheduled to take place in October.

Four men from the neo-Nazi movement were sentenced to prison terms of between one and 18 years in Paris in June 2023.

According to a Europol report published in 2022, France is the European country most exposed to the threat of right-wing extremist terrorism.

In a study on terrorism trends in the EU, the European police agency said that about half of the arrests made in 2021 in connection with right-wing extremist terrorism cases took place in France (29 out of 64).

Alarmed by the increasing number of attacks by far-right groups and the “growing resonance” of their ideas in French society, the National Assembly launched a parliamentary inquiry in 2019 at the request of the left-wing party “La France Inségénérale”. The inquiry concluded that far-right violence in the country had reached “a worrying level of intensity”.

According to the resulting report, political figures in particular were targeted and received threats of death and rape, among other things.

The parliamentary commission expressed concerns about the ability of these groups to operate “by organising summer camps where self-defence courses are held that resemble military training”.

“Some of them are arming themselves and preparing for what they believe is an imminent civil war that would pit ‘us’ against ‘them’ (Muslims, Jews, other minorities),” the report stressed.

According to both reports, the central themes of these right-wing extremist groups are identity and xenophobia.

According to Nicolas Lebourg, a researcher at the University of Montpellier in southern France, about 3,000 people who are “more anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic” are associated with right-wing extremist groups.

He describes them as an “unpredictable” people and speaks of an “ideological reorientation around Islam”.

The fear of a “great replacement”

In her ruling on the 16 AFO members, the judge cited Pnat’s analysis that the group belongs to an “ideology fed by the identification of jihadist terrorism with Islam in general” and the fear of a “great replacement” of the white European population by people of African descent, particularly Muslims.

Since the start of the Israeli war against Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, the number of anti-Islamic acts in France has increased.

In February, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the number of anti-Islamic acts increased by 30 percent in 2023 compared to 2022. Of the 242 registered acts, more than half were committed in the last three months of the year.

The minister admitted that these acts were “still significantly underestimated.”

In recent years, France has ordered the dissolution of several right-wing extremist groups, including Generation Identitaire (Identity Generation) and the student association GUD (Union Defence Group).