Members of a Muslim community near Frankfurt found a severed pig's head at a construction site where a mosque is being built, German police said yesterday.

A spokesman said Tuesday's incident was the latest in a series of provocations by residents opposed to the construction of the mosque, which is being overseen by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DİTİB).

Employing pigs in attacks targeting Muslims or Islamic sites is quite common as pigs are viewed as unclean by Muslims and both breeding them and consuming their meat is haram or forbidden.

Mosques in Germany, where anti-Muslim sentiment that has accompanied the influx of Muslim refugees has been on the rise, are occasionally subject to attacks that range from Molotov cocktails to pig's heads. German police have been criticized for their failure to identify the suspects responsible for the attacks.

Turkish-Germans, who comprise one of the largest minorities in the country with more than 3 million people, have been frequent targets of bigoted attacks in the formerly Nazi-ruled Germany, especially in the 1990s. The trend of attacks targeting mosques re-emerged in recent years with the rise of the far right in the country. In December, German police detained a man linked to the anti-Islamic, xenophobic group Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamification of the West (PEGIDA) on suspicion of involvement in an attack targeting a Turkish mosque and an event venue in Dresden in September. The suspect is accused of throwing homemade explosives at Fatih Mosque, owned by the DİTİB, on Sept. 26.