PARIS: Police have arrested three people after five coffins were found near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, draped in French flags with the inscription “French soldiers in Ukraine,” sources close to the case said Sunday.
The incident is being investigated as a possible interference by a foreign power in French affairs, they told AFP.
Around 9:00 a.m. (0700 GMT) on Saturday, three people left the five life-size coffins on the Quai Branly in Paris near the base of the Eiffel Tower, one of the world's most visited tourist attractions.
The boxes contained gypsum, a source close to the case told AFP.
The driver of a van used to transport the coffins, who was arrested nearby, told police that he had been paid 40 euros ($43) to drive the two others and their cargo, the source said.
The man was believed to have arrived from Bulgaria the evening before.
The two others were apprehended later Saturday across town at the Bercy coach terminal where they were about to board a service to Berlin, the source said.
One of the three people was Bulgarian, another Ukrainian and the third German, the source said. They were still in custody on Sunday.
President Emmanuel Macron said last month the question of sending Western troops to Ukraine would “legitimately” arise if Russia broke through Ukrainian front lines and Kyiv made such a request.
The president was doubling down on earlier comments in which he did not rule out sending troops to Ukraine, which sent shock waves through much of Europe and unsettled allies including Germany.
The Kremlin slammed the remarks, calling them “dangerous.”
French authorities have suspected foreign — notably Russian — interference in domestic affairs in several other recent incidents, including last month when red hand graffiti was painted onto France's Holocaust Memorial.
The three suspects in that case are believed to have fled abroad.
France suspects that Russia was behind another high-profile incident, the daubing of dozens of Stars of David on buildings in Paris and its suburbs shortly after the October 7 attack by Hamas militants on Israel.
Investigators said some of the mass graffiti, widely condemned as anti-Semitic, may have been carried out at the “express demand” of an individual residing abroad, implying a possible connection to Russia.
Moscow has denied having anything to do with it.
France arrests three after coffins left at Eiffel Tower
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France arrests three after coffins left at Eiffel Tower
- The incident is being investigated as a possible interference by a foreign power in French affairs
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
