The mise en abyme begins to be dizzying. The CCTV images that could have helped unravel the controversy over the chaos at the Stade de France on May 28 have been erased, for lack of a requisition of justice. A confession made by the representative of the French Football Federation during his hearing in the Senate on Thursday. “We were immediately stunned, it’s very serious,” regrets this Friday morning on France Info David Assouline, PS vice-president of the law commission of the upper house, who carried out these hearings. “There are 220 cameras, it’s huge. They record live 24 hours a day.he says.
But the senator then explains: “There is no button that says ‘delete’. Stade de France warns in its contracts that it can only keep videos on its servers for seven days, even though the law says one month. Why ? Because it is very expensive to keep them for a long time. All the actors who work with the Stade de France know this. Any judicial police officer (OPJ) or public prosecutor could have asked for images of the organization of the Champions League final, according to him. According to the Worldan OPJ did indeed request the said images from the Stade de France consortium, but only on Thursday evening, ie twelve days after the events of May 28.
“Shocked by what he saw on those 220 cameras”
And they could have been useful, according to what David Assouline retains from the hearing of Erwan Le Prévost, the director of institutional affairs of the French Football Federation: “The gentleman from the FFF is shocked by what he saw on these 220 cameras. He’s talking about ‘extremely violent’ footage, so that gives us an indication of what was on it.” In the absence of an intervention “from a brilliant computer scientist” to find these tapes, the senator now intends “Ask questions about possible images of police violencein particular about tear gas sent indiscriminately on children or pregnant women ”. The upper house must conduct further hearings in this case.
For its part, after the hearing, to say the least, of Didier Lallement before the senators in the morning, the Paris police headquarters clarified on Twitter in the evening still have their own videos of the Stade de France evening: “The images in the possession of the Paris police headquarters are obviously still at the disposal of justice, within the framework of requisitions drawn up in a criminal investigation. Do not confuse images of the police and images of a private operator”. These images, which we still do not know what they show, are supposed to be kept for thirty days by the institution.
Former spokesperson for the Socialist Party, Assouline recalls that these cameras at the Stade de France were “made famous at the time of the attacks [du 13 Novembre 2015]. When François Hollande is at PC security, these are the images he is looking at. They allow you to have a very precise view of the inside and outside of the stadium..
In this fiasco, Senator PS “wonders if there was a leader. If not, it was serious. If there is one who assumes all this, then what is he still doing in his post? he wonders. It’s not serious, it takes professionalism and drawing conclusions” for the Rugby World Cup in 2023 and the 2024 Olympics.
Auditioned by the Senate respectively last Wednesday and this Thursday, Gérald Darmanin and Didier Lallement generally remained straight in their boots. If they said consider using “different” tear gas during“exceptional events” for the first, and recognized a “failure” for the second, the two officials maintained their versions of the events that occurred during the match between Liverpool and Real Madrid in Saint-Denis. After this episode, according to the government spokesperson, Emmanuel Macron had no “did not even need to remind that he fully supported his Minister of the Interior”. An executive meeting on the Stade de France events is scheduled for the day.
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