A serene atmosphere despite the defeat. PSG supporters left the Parc des Princes on Wednesday looking defeated after the victory of FC Barcelona (3-2) under the eye of a large police force, while threats from the Islamic State (IS) group weighed on the Champions League quarter-finals.
In Madrid, the match between Atlético and Borussia Dortmund, won at home by the club of French international Antoine Griezmann (2-1), was also played with a reinforced security system, without any incident not be reported.
“There is no proven threat” to the Paris match, said French government spokesperson Prisca Thevenot, a few hours before kick-off.
The first two quarter-finals between Real Madrid and Manchester City on the one hand (3-3), and Arsenal and Bayern Munich on the other (2-2), also took place on Tuesday without incident.
The high risk since the Moscow attack
In Paris, at the end of a match with twists and turns where Ousmane Dembélé scored and where Kylian Mbappé missed a lot, hundreds of Parisian supporters hurriedly left the stadium, under close surveillance by the CRS deployed.
“I’m just disappointed with what we gave, with what we showed,” Flavien reacted to AFP, wrapped in his Paris Saint Germain scarf. But the 25-year-old assures that “it could be completely different” in the return match, scheduled for Tuesday April 16 in Barcelona.
VIDEO. Champions League: Darmanin announces “considerably reinforced” security on Wednesday in Paris after a “threat” from IS
The pre-match was largely overshadowed by the security issue of these meetings. Appearing a few days ago on the Internet, the threats from IS were initially barely noticed before the authorities announced on Tuesday a strengthening of security measures in a context of very high risk of attack alert in all European countries, revised upwards again after the attack on a Moscow performance hall on March 22, which left 144 dead.
Mobile forces and drones deployed
A little over a hundred days before the Olympic Games (July 26 – August 11), a major security issue, the French Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin indicated on Tuesday that security had been “considerably” reinforced in Paris, speaking of a “clear threat publicly evoked by the Islamic State”.
In total, seven mobile force units were mobilized to ensure security for the PSG-Barça match, as well as specialized units, including the BRI, or around a thousand police officers.
Drones were also to be deployed, according to an order from the Paris police headquarters.
“I think we are quite safe,” Stéphane Vuillemenot, a Parisian supporter, told AFP before kick-off. “And we shouldn’t stop at that, otherwise we won’t do anything anymore. »
Frantz, 28, a Barça supporter, “asked himself the question” before coming. “We are counting on the French state to have tripled the controls and we hope that things will go well,” he said.
2,000 police officers in Madrid
In Madrid too, the prefect Francisco Martín Aguirre announced an “extraordinary security deployment”.
Spanish authorities confirmed to AFP on Wednesday that more than 2,000 agents would be mobilized, as many as for the Real match on Tuesday. However, this is much more than the 1,300 initially planned for the Atlético match.
The number of police officers deployed in Madrid for the match between Atletico Madrid and Borussia Dortmund was increased on Tuesday evening. REUTERS/Susana Vera
The three host cities of the quarter-finals, Madrid, London, Paris, were all faced with mass jihadist attacks, respectively in 2004, 2005 and 2015. On November 13, 2015, the Stade de France was among the targets of jihadist commandos who killed 130 people in Paris.
The authorities of the three countries, however, have not reported detailed plans for attacks that would have been foiled around the four matches.
In one of the IS messages, a fighter, masked and equipped with an assault rifle, poses in front of photos of the four stadiums of the quarter-final first leg. “Kill them all,” it says.
These publications come from al-Azaim, the organ of the Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), the Afghan branch of the organization, which claimed responsibility for the attack in Kerman in Iran in January and is suspected of being behind that of Moscow, a French expert in online communication of jihadist groups told AFP.
