Hunt for Chinese tourist who ‘vandalised’ sacred religious site in Europe to remove message of support for Hong Kong protests

‘We have done a good thing today,’ says woman as video shows her throwing away Catholic cross. ‘Our motherland is great’

A suspected Chinese tourist who vandalised a sacred religious site in Lithuania by apparently removing a message of support for Hong Kong protesters is being hunted by police.

A video posted online shows the unknown woman swiping a wooden cross from the Hill of Crosses, the Baltic country’s most visited and revered religious site.

“We have done a good thing today,” a friend is heard saying as she takes the piece and then throws it away. “Our motherland is great.”

The site – just north of the city of Šiauliai – is a place of Catholic pilgrimage where an estimated 100,000 crosses, crucifixes and effigies have been left since around 1830. Such is the hill’s religious significance; Pope John Paul II visited it in 1993.

Protests and violence have become a regular aspect of life in Hong Kong this year with demonstrators pushing back against a perceived erosion of democratic rights in the city at the hands of Beijing.

Although the vandalism itself is understood to have occurred in November, it only came to light this weekend when the video was placed on Instagram.

Linas Linkevicius, Lithuania’s foreign minister, called the action a “shameful, disgraceful act of vandalism”, adding that such behaviour “can’t and won’t be tolerated”.

He confirmed police had launched an investigation.

The incident may not, however, be isolated. Another photo posted online shows graffiti on a separate cross dated later in November that reads: “Hope all cockroaches soon rest in peace. Hope HK can return to peace.”

It is not the first time the hill has found itself entangled in international geopolitics.

Successive Russian regimes occupying Lithuania have demolished crosses on the but new ones have been erected each time.