Two alleged interference operations with one thing in common: The three men who deposited plaster-filled coffins near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Saturday, June 1, were in contact with a man suspected of having been part of the group that sprayed red hands on the Wall of the Righteous at the Shoah Memorial in Paris in mid-May, according to a document from the local security directorate for the Paris agglomeration (DSPAP) obtained by Le Monde.
On Saturday morning, five coffins were discovered at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, filled with plaster and covered with a French flag bearing the words “French soldiers of Ukraine.” Three men were arrested that day: first the driver of the van used to transport the coffins, who was arrested near the Paris monument, and then, in the afternoon, two other men who were preparing to take a bus to Berlin.
The driver of the van told the police that he had been paid to drop off the individuals and the cargo, and that he had arrived from Bulgaria the day before. The two other men, a Ukrainian and a German, admitted that they had been paid €400 to drop off the coffins.
Involvement in ‘red hands’ case
Le Monde has learned that data from the phone of one of the suspects and the statements in police custody by the three men allowed investigators to establish that they were in contact with a man already suspected of having taken part in another suspected interference operation: the graffiti defacement of red hands painted on the Wall of the Righteous at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, on the night of May 13 to 14.
The man, Georgi F., a 34-year-old Bulgarian national, is suspected of having been part of a group of three men who tagged the Holocaust monument. All three were staying at a hotel in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, on a booking made from Bulgaria. They tried to flee to Brussels as soon as the operation was over, taking a Flixbus bus.
The defacements sparked outrage and the investigation points toward a destabilization operation coordinated from abroad. While those who ordered the operation have not been identified, several clues point to Russia: A few days after the red hand tags were discovered, photos of the defacements were shared online by X accounts belonging to the technical infrastructure of Doppelgänger, a vast Russian online disinformation apparatus run by Russian marketing companies. Above all, the modus operandi of these defacements was almost a copy-paste of the stars of David case, when blue stars of David were spraypainted in several Paris neighborhoods.
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