French police seek conspiracy theorist over kidnapping of girl

French police have issued an international arrest warrant for a far-right conspiracy theorist living in Malaysia, who they allege helped organise the abduction of an eight-year-old girl in eastern France at the request of her mother.

In a case that has prompted concern about the spread of QAnon and survivalist ideas in France, police said they sought the arrest of a former local politician who has called in online videos for a “popular coup d’état”.

François Perain, the Nancy public prosecutor, said statements to police by suspects arrested in the case led him to believe Rémy Daillet-Wiedemann was “the main figure in their so-called ‘movement’, and played a role in the abduction”.

Mia Montemaggi was found safe on Sunday with her mother, Lola, 28, in a squat in a disused factory in Switzerland, five days after she was taken from her grandmother’s home in the eastern Vosges region by three men posing as child protection officers.

Lola Montemaggi, who lost custody of her daughter in January, was banned from seeing her and is suspected of having arranged her kidnapping, is under arrest in Vaud, western Switzerland, awaiting extradition to France, local media have reported.

Montemaggi has posted claims on Facebook of a Satanic paedophile elite at the top of the French state. Along with anti-vax and 5G conspiracy theories, she also reposted claims that social services and child protection agencies were abducting children.

Politicians and celebrities were guilty of paedophilia and “ritual child sacrifice”, she claimed. Montemaggi lost custody of Mia after making suicidal statements in front of her daughter and refusing all contact with social services.

Five men alleged to have been involved in Mia’s abduction in France – described by prosecutors as “a military-style operation” with a codename, Lima – have been arrested by French police and charged with abduction of a minor.

The five, including three who have admitted the kidnapping, were already under surveillance by French intelligence services for their links to extreme-right, anti-system and survivalist online networks, French media have reported.

Aged from 23 to 60 and detained at addresses around France, the men “met on social media and share essentially the same ideas”, Perain said. “They believe in fighting against the state and what they call the ‘doctors’ dictatorship’”.

Police reportedly found guides to making explosives at one address, plus documents suggesting a possible attack on a vaccination centre. Nicolas Heitz, the Épinal public prosecutor, said the men had prepared Mia’s abduction with Montemaggi.

“She contacted them on the internet in order to recover her daughter, from whom she considered she had been unjustly separated,” Heitz said. “The aim was to go abroad with her.” Police said Mia was handed to her mother 20 minutes after the abduction.

Prosecutors have said the pair spent a first night in Switzerland at a hotel near Fribourg and were then taken in by a woman in Neuchâtel before being taken to the disused factory in Ste Croix, which was home to an artists’ commune. Mia has now been returned to her grandmother.

According to Le Parisien newspaper, Daillet-Wiedemann was banned from the centrist MoDem party in 2010 and has lived in Malaysia for several years. He has said in videos that “scientifically useless” face masks should be banned and 5G networks destroyed.

Daillet-Wiedemann has also called for chemtrails – aircraft condensation trails that conspiracy theorists believe contain chemical or biological agents – to be banned and believed children in care had been stolen from their parents and must be returned.

Laurent Nuñez, France’s national anti-terrorism coordinator, said Mia’s abduction appeared to have been inspired by QAnon, the unfounded US conspiracy theory that Satan-worshipping paedophile cannibals run a global child sex-trafficking ring.

“In the logic of these conspiracy theorists, the state can be seen as responsible for the removal of children from their parents for reasons of safety that they consider to be unjust,” Nuñez wrote in Le Parisien, adding that “several hundred” followers of the theory were under surveillance in France.