Four Moldovan nationals are strongly suspected of being behind some of the 250 Star of David tags found on walls in Paris and its suburbs over the past 10 days. One couple was arrested on October 27, another is on the run. French intelligence agencies now firmly believe it was an external attempt at destabilization. In a press release issued on Tuesday, November 7, the Paris prosecutor said that the examination of telephone data "suggests that the two pairs of perpetrators were in touch with the same third person." The prosecutor also stated that "at this stage, it cannot be ruled out that the marking of the blue Stars of David in the Paris region was carried out at the express request of a person living abroad." The investigation has now been handed to an investigating magistrate.
Le Monde's analysis, confirmed by two independent experts, finds that the operation was exploited by the "Doppelgänger" network, also known as RRN (for Reliable Recent News). On October 28, a large number of accounts affiliated with this network started sharing on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook two photos of the blue tags on the walls of a building on Rue de Rocroy, in Paris's 10th arrondissement. The vandalism from that night led to the arrest of a couple of Moldovan nationals, aged 28 and 33.
The RRN propaganda infrastructure – which, in addition to bots publishing large quantities of messages on social media, also runs fake news sites in French and has previously created fake copies of major news websites (including Le Monde) – had been publicly denounced by the French government on June 13. In a rare statement, the Foreign Affairs Ministry had attributed the disinformation operation to Russia, seeing it as "a new illustration of the hybrid strategy that Russia is implementing to undermine the conditions for a peaceful democratic debate and thus undermine our democratic institutions."
The photos of Star of David tags posted by accounts linked to the "Doppelgänger" network don't appear to have been published by anyone else. They were not published by any news media and Le Monde has not been able to find any other source for them on social media. In the meantime, the Moldovan couple was arrested. Preliminary findings from investigators suggest that, following the principle of compartmentalization of any clandestine action, a third party was tasked with capturing photographs of the tags. These images were then sent to the operation's sponsor as evidence of mission completion, enabling them to share them online.
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