Four Bulgarians went on trial in France Wednesday accused of desecrating a Jewish memorial with red handprints last year, which prosecutors think may have been foreign interference linked to Russia.
The vandalism was staged during heightened tensions in France over the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas that broke out in October 2023.
The trial is the first of its kind in France, one of a series of similar cases suspected of having been orchestrated by a foreign power with the aim to destabilise.
The Paris prosecutor’s office says the red handprint incident, possibly “orchestrated by Russian intelligence services”, is one of nine such suspected acts of foreign meddling.
Other suspicious incidents include stars of David stencilled in the Paris region in October 2023; coffins bearing the words “French soldiers of Ukraine” left at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in June last year; and more recently in September, pigs’ heads left in front of mosques in the Paris region.
Viginum, the French authority monitoring foreign interference online, said the red hand incident had been exploited by “actors linked to Russia” on X.
In the trial, three of the defendants stand accused of daubing 35 red hand marks in the night of May 13 to 14 last year on the memorial’s Wall of the Righteous in Paris.
The wall lists 3,900 people honoured for protecting Jews during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.
Several other red hands were found in nearby areas of central Paris.
Two of the three accused of defacing the memorial are being held in custody after having been extradited from Croatia and Bulgaria.
The third is to be tried in absentia, as the suspect remains on the run.
A fourth suspect, also in custody, has been charged with complicity for having booked accommodation and transport for the others.
If convicted, they could face up to seven years in jail.
– ‘FSB’s Fifth Service’ –
The prosecutor’s office said a security agent had caught two people placing stencils on the memorial.
Investigators identified them with security footage, then discovered that three had caught a bus to Belgium the next morning, then a flight to Bulgaria.
After the memorial was defaced, French prosecutors launched a criminal probe for damage to a protected historical building with national, ethnic, racial or religious motives.
One of those accused, Georgi Filipov, last year denied he had acted out of racial or religious motives, insisting his act was “hooliganism” after drinking too much alcohol.
French researcher Clement Renault said it was “the very first trial in a series of legal cases that have been unfolding over the past two years, which authorities link to foreign interference operations.
“Intelligence reports included in the court file attribute the ‘red hands’ operation to the FSB’s Fifth Service,” the intelligence expert at France’s Institute for Strategic Research added, referring to Russia’s security service.
The trial comes after a British court in May handed down jail terms of up to 10 years to six Bulgarians convicted of belonging to a Russian espionage cell.
The spies were motivated by money and operated across borders in the UK, Austria, Spain, Germany and Montenegro, the court heard.
Bellingcat investigative journalist Christo Grozev was among those targeted by the network after he exposed Russian links to the Novichok nerve agent attacks in the English city of Salisbury in 2018 and the downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane in July 2014.
Bulgarian agents had followed him and his family’s movements and spied on their communications, he said in a court statement.