Headstone at Jewish cemetery
Headstone at Jewish cemeteryiStock

A Danish court on Friday sentenced a 39-year-old man with neo-Nazi sympathies to a year in prison for desecrating a Jewish cemetery in the western town of Randers, AFP reports.

The man and his 28-year-old accomplice were both found guilty of desecrating a graveyard and aggravated vandalism, but the latter's sentence has yet to be handed down.

The two men were charged with scrawling in green paint on 84 gravestones and knocking over several of them in Randers, located some 177 kilometers (110 miles) northeast of Copenhagen in November of 2019.

They were arrested several days after the incident.

The two were also found guilty of vandalism on two other occasions, for covering a building adorned with two Stars of David with paint and putting stickers with the logo of the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR) group on a rainbow-colored park bench.

These "actions were sending a message that was intended to threaten, insult or degrade certain groups because of their beliefs, ethnic origins or sexual orientation," police prosecutor Cathrine Brunsgaard Jacobsen said in a statement after the sentencing.

The 39-year-old, whose name was not disclosed, is a leading member of the Danish branch of NMR, according to the prosecutor.

On the same day that the vandalism at the cemetery was reported, stickers shaped like yellow stars that Nazis made Jews wear during the Holocaust were placed on multiple Jewish sites in Denmark, as well as Sweden.

In Denmark, the number of anti-Semitic acts rose by 50 percent from 2017 to 2018, the Jewish community said in 2019.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)