Three men, one of them Bulgarian, who are suspected of placing coffins with the inscription "French" soldiers from Ukraine“ at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, were brought before a French court in order to establish “possible foreign interference”, France Press reported, BTA reported.
The prosecutor's office requested that the three suspects be charged with premeditated crime. The three men are a 38-year-old Bulgarian man who drove the car carrying the coffins, a 25-year-old man born in Germany and a 17-year-old man born in Ukraine, the prosecutor's office said. The three left on Saturday morning "five life-size coffins, covered with the French flag, with the inscription "French soldiers from Ukraine", a source informed about the case told AFP. There was plaster in the coffins.
According to the same source, the van driver was then “interrogated nearby” to the Eiffel Tower. Checking his phone showed a connection with a man, also of Bulgarian citizenship, who was “identified” by the investigators in connection with another case - with the painted “red hands” at the Holocaust memorial in Paris in mid-May, a police source said.
According to an informed source close to the case, two other people were arrested in the afternoon at the bus station in Bercy, who were preparing to “take a bus to Berlin”. When questioned, the driver told the police that he did not know the two youths who had unloaded the coffins. He said he met them “the day before with the coffins and asked them to open them to make sure there were no bodies,” a police source told AFP.
The two young men said that they “met once in Berlin, but came to France separately”, adds this source. All three said they were “unemployed and needed money”, added the police source. The driver “received 120 euros for the work, and the youth - 400 euros”. The incident resembles two recent cases in which the same suspicions of “possible foreign interference“ exist.
On the night of May 13-14, "red hands" were painted on the Holocaust memorial in Paris. and the police suspect three people who fled abroad. In October, after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, stars of David were spray painted on the facades of several buildings in the Paris region. The French authorities blame the Russian Federal Security Service (FSS) for the events for which a Moldovan couple was arrested. In both cases, it is about “contractors who are paid to destabilize and take advantage of the division in French society”, as French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Stéphane Sejournet said in mid-May.< /p>