PARIS: A French judge has charged three Serbs with vandalizing Jewish sites with paint at the weekend “to serve the interests of a foreign power,” a judicial source said Friday.

A source close to the case said investigators suspect Russia is behind the attacks for which the men were charged on Thursday evening.

They had exchanged messages on Telegram with other individuals not yet apprehended, it added.

France’s Holocaust memorial, three Paris synagogues and a restaurant were vandalized with paint in the night of Friday to Saturday, in what the Israeli embassy denounced as a “coordinated anti-Semitic attack.”

The source following the case described the three suspects, two born in 1995 and one born in 2003, as having completed a task motivated by financial compensation, but without being aware of any geopolitical implications.

They were two brothers and a third person who had lived in France for several years, the source said.

They were arrested on Monday in southeast France as they tried to leave the country.

French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said he was “deeply disgusted by these heinous acts targeting the Jewish community.”

Israeli’s President Isaac Herzog said Saturday he was “dismayed” by the Paris vandalism, noting that his great-grandfather had been a rabbi at one of the synagogues.

In the run-up to the Summer Olympics in Paris last year, several high-profile stunts intended to influence French public opinion led French officials to point the finger at Moscow.

They included red hands tagged on Paris’s main Holocaust memorial in May 2024.

In October 2023, soon after the Palestinian militant attack on Israel that sparked the latest Gaza war, stars of David were tagged on buildings in the Paris region, with two Moldovans suspected of working for the Russian FSB security service later arrested.

Russia has previously denied any involvement in any of the plots attributed to it by French officials.