A French man was fined 700 euros on Monday for sending Jews letters with the inscription “Jew equals Zyklon B”, the gas used by Nazi Germany to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust.

A police court in the eastern city of Colmar found Emmanuel Rist guilty of sending the letters, which included a star of David and a drawing of a can with the message on it.

The letters were sent to two regional newspapers, a local Jewish organisation, and two prominent members of the Jewish community.

“It was stupid,” Rist, a former security guard, said in front of the courthouse.

Rist is also under investigation over an attack on a Jewish graveyard in 2004 in which swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans were painted on 127 tombstones, and over a bomb explosion which injured one Moroccan in September 2005.

Reuters