PARIS: French intelligence is ‘‘taking seriously’’ the idea that Russia has fanned panic over its bedbug outbreak.

Reported outbreaks of bedbugs infesting homes and migrating to metros and cinemas have produced plenty of headlines in France.

Algeria said in early October it would introduce preventive measures to ward off the spread of bedbugs to the country from France on planes and ships.

Russia blamed for fanning bedbug panic

Henry Samuel

A test tube full of bedbugs was even brought into the French parliament by an MP raising concern about the ‘‘wave of panic that has seized the country’’.

The government staged an emergency meeting earlier this month and Clement Beaune, the transport minister, pledged to send sniffer dogs into trains to check for their presence.

While experts say global warming and the revival of international travel and tourism following COVID lockdowns haved caused an increase in the bloodsucking insects, others suggest the national debate is disproportionate and the outbreak is not significant.

Against this backdrop, French intelligence agents cited by RMC radio say they strongly suspect Russia of seeking to amplify fears by spreading ‘‘doppelganger’’ articles on social media that appear to come from respected French news outlets but are faked.

Agence France-Presse’s factchecking body, AFP Factuel, identified two such articles.

The first – supposedly published by La Montagne, a regional newspaper – claimed that effective insecticides used to kill the pests had fallen foul of an embargo on Russian chemicals. The article was translated into various languages.

La Montagne told AFP Factuel it had never published such an article, denouncing it as a forgery.

AFP Factuel, meanwhile, pointed out that bedbugs had been present in France long before sanctions against Russia.

In another instance, a fake article purporting to have been written by Left-leaning national newspaper Liberation and relayed by a Telegram account linked to Kremlin-owned news outlet Russia Today claimed that Ukrainian refugees were to blame for the surge in bedbugs. A similar fake piece was attributed to Le Figaro, the conservative daily.

This northern spring, Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna decried such ‘‘doppelganger’’ articles

– often anti-Ukrainian – churned out by Russian troll factories as ‘‘unworthy of a country with a UN security council seat’’.

While Russia may have stoked fears, RMC added that French intelligence did not see it as having initiated the panic. Rather it ‘‘rode the wave’’ as part of its ‘‘hybrid war’’ on the West.

Mathilde Panot, the leftist MP and parliamentary leader of the France Unbowed party, this month said she had alerted authorities in 2017 that there were 200,000 locations infested. The figure rose to 500,000 by 2019 and 1.2 million by 2022, she said.

But handlers of two sniffer dogs trained to pinpoint bedbugs via their smell said there had been no explosion in cases in Paris.

‘‘Frankly no. We’ve been in the business for more than a decade and we’ve always been called to hotels, schools and cinemas,’’ said Aldo Massaglia, who co-runs the Doggybug anti-pest company.

The Telegraph, London

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