Red Hands Tags at the Holocaust Memorial in Paris: Three Bulgarians Arrested

No fewer than 35 tags representing red hands were painted on the Wall of the Righteous during the night of May 13-14.

Three Bulgarian nationals close to the extreme right, suspected of having spray-painted red hands on the Shoah Memorial in Paris in May, a museum dedicated to Jewish history during the Second World War, have been arrested, Bulgarian authorities announced on Friday, July 26.

Two of them were arrested on Thursday in Bulgaria and another in another European Union member state, the Bulgarian National Security Agency said. The first, aged 35, was arrested in the capital Sofia and the second, aged 27, in the city of Blagoevgrad (southwest), spokespeople for the respective prosecutors’ offices told AFP.

“Gravitating in far-right circles in Bulgaria”they are accused of having “vandalized” the Memorial on the night of May 13-14, according to the National Security Agency, which is seeking to identify “their accomplices and the instigators of these acts”.

No fewer than 35 graffiti depicting red hands had been painted on the Wall of the Righteous, outside the museum, where plaques bearing the names of the 3,900 men and women who helped save Jews during the Second World War are displayed.

The Paris prosecutor’s office had opened a judicial investigation, investigating the trail of three suspects fleeing abroad, and issued a European arrest warrant.

The investigation concerns facts of “damage to the property of others committed in a group” with the aggravating circumstance that they were committed “because of real or supposed belonging to an ethnic group, race or religion”, which carries a seven-year prison sentence.