The president of the mosque in Pessac (south-east France), who is of Nigerian nationality, was detained on Thursday morning as part of a deportation procedure, a few days after a court ruling had paved the way for his regularisation, his lawyer said.

Abdurrahman Ridvan, who runs the Al-Farouk mosque in Pessac on the outskirts of Bordeaux and is considered by the authorities to be of a "Salafist persuasion", was detained at his home at around 6.30am on Thursday, his lawyer Sefen Guez Guez told AFP. The Nigerian passport of the fifty-year-old was not found by the police who searched the imam's home and mosque, his counsel added.

The operation was carried out under a ministerial expulsion order published on Monday, confirmed a source close to the case. According to the order consulted by AFP, the Ministry of the Interior accuses Ridvan, who was already under house arrest during the Olympic Games, of disseminating on social networks "an ideology hostile to the values and institutions of the French Republic". The authorities also accused him of "anti-Semitic and hateful publications against Israel and Jews", notably by relaying, four days after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, a press cartoon presenting the Palestinian Islamist organisation as a "self-defence" movement and "clearing this organisation of the terrorist dimension of its action".

Last week, the Bordeaux administrative court ordered the authorities to "re-examine" Ridvan’s application to renew his residence permit, which had gone unanswered, and to issue him with a provisional "receipt" authorising him to work in France, according to the decision consulted by AFP. In June, a judicial court deportation commission had issued an unfavourable advisory opinion concerning his possible deportation. According to lawyer Guez, this "new procedure is based on the opinion of the judicial court and the decision of the Bordeaux administrative court".

"The State is organising the operation so quickly that the court cannot intervene, which is scandalous", added the lawyer, who intends to lodge an appeal "as a matter of urgency". In 2022, publications on social networks had already led to the administrative closure of the Pessac Mosque, which was finally annulled by the Administrative Court of Bordeaux and then the Council of State, the supreme administrative judge in France.