José Andrés, the Spanish-American chef and founder of the NGO World Central Kitchen, has been inadvertently involved in the incident with Ryan Rough with the appearance of a photo of him on social media alongside the protagonist of the bizarre - and potentially deadly - arrest in Palm Beach on Sunday.
The photo was taken in Kiev some time ago when Rough was a well-known figure in the capital of Ukraine for his tendency to 'set up shop' with American flags in Maidan Square. The square is a symbol of the country after being the focal point of the 'Orange Revolution' of 2014, which definitively removed Ukraine from the Russian orbit. Andrés' tendency to take photos with his fans seems to have been the reason for the image. In statements to ELMUNDO, the chef, born in Mieres (Asturias) and naturalized American, strongly condemned "any form of political violence."
The circulating photo on Twitter, however, has no date and is not a retweet, and it is currently unknown how it ended up on that platform or if it had been there for some time. Obviously, this is not a hindrance for pro-Russian and pro-Trump accounts, which claim that the photo of a chef who provides food to people in wars like those in Ukraine and Gaza - where his organization was bombed by Israel - and a man who once wrote to US senators asking them to "lend" him Patriot anti-aircraft missiles to then take them to Ukraine, and another to the Government of Taiwan offering an army of 50,000 Afghan soldiers to fight China, is evidence of a high-level conspiracy aimed at assassinating a White House candidate.