SOFIA: A Bulgarian man fighting extradition to France for defacing the Paris Holocaust memorial in May denied Wednesday that he had acted out of racial motives, telling AFP it was “just hooliganism.”
France issued European arrest warrants for three Bulgarians after red hands were painted on the Paris Holocaust Memorial’s Wall of the Righteous, which lists 3,900 people honored for protecting Jews during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.
Two Bulgarians, identified by a Sofia court as 35-year-old Georgi Filipov and 27-year-old Kiril Milushev, were detained in the Bulgarian capital in July. A third suspect was detained in Croatia.
A Sofia court on Wednesday held a hearing on whether Filipov should be extradited to France, but postponed a decision until September 26.
“I took part in this but not in the sense that they say in the media, it had nothing to do with chauvinism, racism or anything else of the sort,” Filipov told AFP before the hearing.
“I have nothing against anyone there, or the buildings. I had simply drunk a lot of alcohol. This was just hooliganism,” he said.
He told AFP that he had planned to go to Paris “to see the Eiffel tower.”
“We were a bunch of drunk people, someone proposed to do something like that and I didn’t refuse, which I regret.”
He insisted he “had no idea whatsoever” what the red hands symbolize, adding that he had no alternative to running away after coming to his “senses the next day.”
On Monday, a regional court ordered the extradition of Milushev to France.
Bulgaria’s state security agency (SANS) said in July that the suspects “are known to gravitate around Bulgarian groups that profess far-right extremist ideology” and the agency is working to identify the instigators of the May 14 vandalism.
French prosecutors are investigating the men for participating in a criminal group to prepare a crime as well as damaging a protected historical building for national, ethnic, racial or religious motives.