QAnon influence has now been tracked to 85 countries, and its beliefs have been adapted to local contexts and languages from Hindi to Hebrew.
PARIS -- The old music box factory had been abandoned for years on the outskirts of the Swiss mountain town, with paint curling at the edges of its dingy grey and yellow walls.
A California father this summer took his two children to Mexico and killed them under the influence of “QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories,” federal authorities say. QAnon supporters also have been linked to at least six attempted kidnappings in the United States, convinced that children are falling victim to pedophiles, according to Mia Bloom, who documented the abductions for her book on QAnon published this summer.
Two men charged in the abduction were also charged last week in an unrelated far-right plot against vaccine centers. Montemaggi was freed Monday after nearly six months in jail, but remains under judicial supervision until her trial.Montemaggi is a 28-year-old woman with glossy chestnut hair and pale eyes, a lilting voice and a smile whose very edges curved upwards. Two stars are tattooed on the fragile skin inside her wrist.
The month of her 28th birthday, she concluded that the French government was illegitimate and its laws no longer applied to her, beliefs central to what is known as the sovereign citizen movement. Like QAnon, the sovereign citizen movement started in the U.S., and its followers are anti-government extremists who believe that they don’t have to answer to government authorities, including courts and law enforcement.
In March 2020, a Kentucky mother who adhered to QAnon as well as an American sovereign citizen movement kidnapped her children from her grandmother, who was their guardian. In November the same year, a woman who had lost custody of her children shot her legal advisor in the head in Florida after deciding he had joined a cabal of child-stealing Satanists.
“In Europe, a tipping point came when everything got wrapped “under the banner of ‘Save our Children,’” said Andreas Önnerfors, a Swedish researcher who studies the history of conspiracy theories. Five men, ages 23 to 60, came together in the plot they dubbed “Operation Lima” – an anagram of Lola and Mia’s names. They gave themselves code names as well: Jeannot, Pitchoun, the Crow, Bruno, Bouga. A sixth man, a retired lieutenant-general from the French military, forged government paperwork for the mission in France’s Vosges region, near Switzerland.
A quick call to the real child protective services revealed her mistake. By then Mia was long gone, on her way to a neighboring village. That’s when Daillet-Wiedemann stepped in again from Malaysia, Pérain said. He sent out a call for shelter that only one person answered — and only for one night. Mia and Montemaggi were still missing, but investigators now knew that they had crossed the border and were headed east.On April 15, Montemaggi and Mia were driven to the decommissioned music box factory. It lacked electricity, running water and beds, but had something the young mother turned kidnapper needed more – isolation.
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French child kidnap plot shows global sway of QAnon stylePARIS (AP) — The old music box factory had been abandoned for years on the outskirts of the Swiss mountain town, with paint curling at the edges of its dingy grey and yellow walls. It was the perfect hiding place for the young French mother and her 8-year-old daughter at the heart of Operation Lima, an international child abduction plot planned and funded by a French group with echoes of the far-right extremist movement QAnon .
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