Snipers, sniffer dogs and extra searches will anchor the biggest security operation seen at a sporting event in France when the national rugby team host Italy in their opening Six Nations game at the Stade de France on Saturday.
This weekend’s match will be the first sporting event to be held at the national stadium in Paris since it was targeted by an Isis cell on 13 November as France hosted Germany in a football friendly. A passer-by was killed when the terrorists detonated their explosive vests but the casualties could have been far worse if any of the three suicide bombers had managed to get past security and inside the stadium.
Security at the Stade had already been beefed up following the terrorist attacks in Paris in January 2015, and it is being strengthened still further before Saturday’s match. The clampdown will begin in earnest when bomb disposal teams sweep the stadium and its environs on Friday; the police presence will be more than doubled on the day of the tournament’s opening game.
The man in charge of the Stade de France operation is Robert Broussard, known in France as a ‘super-cop’. In the early 1970s he was one of the leading figures in the Brigades de recherche et d’intervention [BRI], the elite police unit that today is in the vanguard of the fight against terrorism.
Broussard, who is 79, has been in charge of stadium security for the French Rugby Federation [FFR]for the past five years. When he took the job in 2011 he probably expected a relatively easy time but now Broussard faces a challenging couple of months. The match against Italy on Saturday is followed by Ireland the following weekend and the visit of England on the final day of the tournament on 19 March.
“Our objective is that people will come feeling confident,” he told the Journal du Dimanche, advising those with tickets to arrive in plenty of time to pass through the security checks.
Past rugby internationals at the Stade de France have been overseen by 100 police and 700 security staff and stewards. This Saturday there will be 250 police and 900 security staff, perhaps more if – as rumoured – the president, François Hollande, and prime minister, Manuel Valls, attend the match alongside the sports minister, Thierry Braillard.
Hollande was in the Stade de France on the evening of 13 November and his presence on Saturday would be highly symbolic. It would also add to the pressure on Broussard but, as befits a former commissioner of police, he is exuding calm confidence. “We want the match to take place in the best conditions and with the same spirit of warmth that one always finds at rugby games, “ he told Midi Olympique on Monday. “One must above all not panic people. So today we are confident, calm but also very vigilant.”
While Broussard is in charge of security inside the stadium, outside is the domain of the police. “We’ve moved from a system geared to controlling crowds and hooliganism to a system aimed at stopping terrorist attacks,” said Laurent Simonin, the police chief responsible for securing the area outside the Stade.
The three rugby internationals will provide the French police with invaluable experience before this summer’s Euro 2016 football championship when tens of thousands of supporters from across the continent will descend on France. On Saturday police will cordon off the immediate approach to the stadium with seven lines of staggered barriers where security staff will search spectators and their bags. There will then be a second search at the turnstiles before fans can enter the stadium and take their seats.
Broussard, a lifelong rugby supporter, has written to the Italian Rugby Federation to make them and the Italian fans who will be among the expected 60,000 crowd aware of the security measures. The gist of the message, he told Midi Olympique, was: “Security is everybody’s affair. In this type of situation the smooth running of an event relies on the good behaviour and understanding of everybody.”
(Guardian service)
