Garden Gnomes Gather in Shadowy Operation

Reuters

STRASBOURG, France (July 12) - More than 100 garden gnomes and other gaudy statues were discovered on Wednesday assembled on a traffic circle in eastern France, a police spokesman said.

Some of the statues were set up to spell out ''Free the Gnomes.'' No one claimed immediate responsibility for the stunt, but police said it bore all the hallmarks of the shadowy Garden Gnome Liberation Front.

The kitsch little creatures were reported stolen from numerous gardens around the town of Chavelot overnight and subsequently gathered together on the roundabout.

''It was a bit like a giant creche. Everything had been carefully set up,'' a police spokesman said.

The Gnome Liberation Front rose to prominence in the mid- 1990s following a series of raids on gardens to ''free'' gnomes and ''return them to the wild.''

The group suffered a setback in 1997 when a court handed its ringleader a suspended prison sentence and fined him for his part in the disappearance of some 150 gnomes.

After briefly going to ground, the Front hit the headlines again in 1998 when it staged a mass ''suicide'' of gnomes in eastern France. Last year, the group struck Paris, stealing around 20 gnomes during a night raid on a Paris garden exhibition.