FRENCH gendarmes blamed bored, drunken youths yesterday for a spate of attacks on Commonwealth war graves in northern France.

The gendarmerie is planning to step up patrols after headstones and crosses were smashed at the First World War cemetery at Aix-Noulette outside Lens in the third such incident over the past ten days.

The attacks have dismayed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and infuriated French government ministers. Detectives said that the vandalism was part of a pattern witnessed in recent years at weekends and during school holidays.

“Youngsters from rural communities tend to gather in these cemeteries because they are out of the way and no one can see what they are doing,” Colonel Dominique Michenet, of the regional gendarmerie headquarters in Lille, said. “They have a cigarette and a beer and then one decides to do something stupid by kicking over a headstone and the others copy him.”

The three incidents, however, were quite different to the attack on the British cemetery at Etaples, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, in April, he said. Then, graves were defaced with swastikas and graffiti expressing opposition to the war in Iraq in what gendarmes interpreted as anti-British sentiment.

“I think the latest examples are just mindless vandalism of the sort we see in these parts several times a year,” Colonel Michenet said. “There is no evidence that anti-British feeling is behind them.”

He said that three youths, all aged 15, had been arrested for breaking 45 gravestones of British, Canadian and New Zealand soldiers at St Aubert cemetery near Cambrai in nothern France at the end of last month. They are also accused of burning the visitors’ book at the cemetery.

Another four youths, two of whom are aged 17, one 18 and one 16, have been arrested for smashing 12 headstones at the nearby Quesnel cemetery. The 18-year-old, who will be tried in a criminal court in Amiens in October, faces a maximum sentence of one year in prison.

The other suspects will be sent to a children’s court, where their parents are likely to be ordered to repay the cost of repairing the graves.

Investigators believe that the vandals responsible for breaking 15 headstones at Aix-Noulette will be of a similar age. “This was a totally gratuitous act,” a spokesman said.

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