July 13, 2022, 10:20 AM
July 13, 2022, 10:20 AM
Incidents at the Champions League final on May 28 at the Stade de France, outside Paris, are not related to the presence of Liverpool fans “around the stadium”, estimated the French senators, pointing rather to the “failures” of the authorities.
In presenting the conclusions of his report, Laurent Lafon, president of the French Senate’s Culture Commission, and the president of the Law Commission, François Noël Buffet, emphasized the “failures” of the authorities in these facts, imputable, according to them, to the prefecture of police of Paris.
They also denounced an erroneous “analysis” of the Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin, about what happened.
Darmanin, who quickly framed english fans before making his apologies, he stated at his hearing before senators that nearly “35,000” fans with forged tickets, or no tickets, had turned up that night at the Stade de France.
The president of the Culture Commission considered that this “partial and imprecise analysis” of the Minister of the Interior after the incidents, which places the responsibility on the presence of counterfeit bills, “is not the correct one”.
The event –between Real Madrid and Liverpool– which was going to be a showcase just over a year before the Rugby World Cup and before the Olympic Games in two years, turned into a nightmare for law enforcement and government.
Spectators without tickets climbed through the fences of the stadium while others, provided with tickets, not being able to enter.
Several families were tear gas spray by the police or were victims of robberies and assaults committed by opportunistic criminals.
The senatorial report recommends a fortnight of measures, among them that of “force operators” to keep the video surveillance images “for the legal period of one month” or even “make the use of unfalsifiable banknotes mandatory”.
For Lafon, yes “box office management was inadequatein no case can it be considered as the only cause of the incidents”.
