“The two Moldovan nationals suspected of having tagged coffins in Paris at the end of June with a mention of Ukraine remain in detention, the appeal court having rejected their lawyers’ appeal on Monday,” AFP learned on Tuesday from a judicial source.
These two suspects were indicted on June 22 for “damage and participation in (an) enterprise to demoralize the army with a view to harming national defense in peacetime” and have since been in pretrial detention. Initially, the investigation had been opened for “damage in a group and criminal association.”
“Authors of innocuous inscriptions”
A decision by the investigating chamber made on Monday and described as “unconstitutional” by the suspects’ lawyers, Mes Emanuel de Dinechin and Louis Gloria: “we will immediately file an appeal,” they declared to AFP.
“The magistrates are re-establishing a crime of opinion that has fallen into disuse since the Algerian war, namely the demoralization of the armies, to detain the authors of trivial inscriptions, liable at most to a fine for minor damage,” they also commented the day after their incarceration.
The two Moldovans in question are suspected of having tagged coffins with red paint, accompanied by the inscriptions “Stop the Death” on the facades of Le Figaro and Agence France Presse, all signed “Mriya Ukraine”, the name of a mysterious Ukrainian artistic collective that had claimed responsibility for the deposits of coffins, at the beginning of June, in front of the Eiffel Tower. The two Moldovans had explained that they had been paid around a hundred euros by a sponsor.
On June 22, in a post on X, Moldovan Foreign Minister Mihai Popsoi “strongly condemned Russia’s hybrid tactics in France, involving citizens of Moldova in acts of vandalism and incitement to hatred.”
Tags constantly increasing
Since the beginning of June, there has been an increase in the number of inscriptions on the walls of Paris linked to the war in Ukraine, like the dozens of red hands inscribed in May on the Shoah memorial in the Jewish quarter of central Paris.
The facts attributed to the two suspects are also similar to more recent tags dating back to the night of June 6 to 7, in the 7th arrondissement, showing coffins with the words “French soldiers in Ukraine”. Three people, of Moldovan nationality, had been identified by territorial security investigators and arrested near the Ministry of Transformation and Civil Service, in possession of aerosols and stencils.
