An 18-year-old Chechen has been charged in France for allegedly planning an “Islamist-inspired” attack against next summer’s Paris Olympics. The detainee wanted to attack spectators and law enforcement near the football stadium in the city of Saint-Étienne, where several football matches will be held, and then die as a martyr, as announced this Friday by the French Ministry of the Interior.
According to Interior, this is the first attack against the Olympic and Paralympic Games that has been thwarted, and number 50 since 2017, when the current president, Emmanuel Macron, came to power. The terrorist threat is a cause of concern for the French authorities at the Games. For July 26, the day of the opening ceremony on the Seine, 45,000 police and gendarmes are expected to be deployed.
The accused in Saint-Étienne, who had arrived in France last year with his parents and siblings, denied during interrogations that he had carried out locations in the vicinity of the Geoffroy-Guichard stadium, as he is accused, according to the BFM-TV network. The same network, citing a source in the investigation, states that the man “simply recognized ‘exchanges’ and ‘conversations’ in encrypted messaging applications” with people who are linked to the Islamic State or other radical movements, conversations in which, he stated , “he was trying to act tough.”
The Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office announced in a statement that agents from the General Directorate of Internal Security arrested the suspect on May 22 in Saint-Étienne, one of the Olympic sub-venues, southwest of Lyon. On May 26, he was charged with “terrorist association of criminals with a view to preparing crimes that attack people.”
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, stated that the intelligence services had received information according to which there were people locating possible locations for an attack during the football matches at the Games. Darmanin explained that, after verifying the difficulties in attacking the stadium directly, the young man was going to directly attack the spectators in its vicinity.
The newspaper Le Parisian identifies the suspect as Rokhman B. and assures that he was in contact “with jihadist members of ISIS-K”, a branch of the Islamic State, which is attributed with the attack that left 145 dead on March 22 in a concert hall in Moscow. The same newspaper states that, in the intercepted exchanges, he wrote in Cyrillic: “If I carried out an attack there [el estadio de Saint-Étienne]”It would cause many victims.”
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The accused is not the first citizen with origins in the North Caucasus to be involved in a terrorist attack in France. The man who beheaded Professor Samuel Paty, in October 2018, at an institute near Paris, was also a radicalized young Chechen. And the person responsible for a knife attack in the Paris Opera district, a few months before, too. The murderer of Professor Dominique Bernard last October in the northern city of Arras was originally from Ingushetia, also in the Caucasus.
In an article published after the Arras attack, Le Monde spoke of “a new generation [de caucásicos afincados en Francia] more attracted [que la de sus mayores] for global jihad.” Le Monde cited a 2020 DGSI report that noted: “Despite its very weak demographic weight in France, the North Caucasus community is overrepresented in the French jihadist contingent that has reached the land of jihad.” He added that “individuals of the new Chechen generation who have remained in the national territory are frequently represented in violent action projects.”
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