Beyond football fans, all eyes were on the Emirates Stadium in London and the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid on Tuesday evening for the quarter-finals of the Champions League. And this is due to a threat broadcast by Daesh in recent days on social networks. These first two C1 matches between Arsenal and Bayern Munich (2-2), and between Real Madrid and Manchester City (3-3), took place without incident.
Security remains “reinforced” this Wednesday in Paris and Madrid before the last two quarters, PSG-Barcelona and Atlético-Borussia Dortmund, after the message “Kill them all” claimed by the Islamic State group (IS), with mention of the four stages concerned. This threat on the Internet had initially been 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 further upwards after the attack on a Moscow performance hall on March 22, which left 144 dead.
“An extraordinary security deployment” in Madrid
Tuesday, just over 100 days before the Paris 2024 Olympics, which represent a major security challenge, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin indicated that security had been “considerably” reinforced after this threat from Daesh. In a video message, the prefect of Madrid Francisco Martín Aguirre announced an “extraordinary security deployment, in accordance with the alert level determined by the intelligence services of the state security forces”.
The reinforcement, however, appeared modest on Tuesday evening, with “more than 2,000 agents” mobilized, compared to 1,900 in the initial plan during the Real-Manchester City match. In London, the police explained on Tuesday that they had been informed of this threat, but one of their officials had “reassured the public about the robustness of the security plan” around the Emirates Stadium, where Arsenal and Bayern Munich played.
Danilo Pereira and PSG “focused” on football
The three host cities of the C1 quarter-finals, Madrid, London and Paris, have all been faced with mass jihadist attacks, respectively in 2004, 2005 and 2015. On November 13, 2015, the Stade de France was among the targets of the jihadist commandos who killed a total of 130 people in the French capital. If the threat is considered permanent, the authorities of the three countries have however not reported detailed plans for attacks which would have been foiled around the four matches.
In one of the IS threat messages, a fighter, masked and armed with an assault rifle, poses in front of photos of the four stadiums which will host the quarter-final first leg. “Kill them all”, it is therefore written in English. These publications come from al-Azaim, the organ of the Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), the branch of IS in Afghanistan, which claimed responsibility for the attack in Kerman in Iran in January and which is suspected to be behind that of Moscow, explains a French expert in the online communication of jihadist groups.
This specialist described as “incentivizing” these messages which “count on the emboldening of the IS sphere following the “coup” of the Moscow attack”. “Safety is important but we have to concentrate on what we have to do, playing football,” said Parisian defender Danilo Pereira on Tuesday, on the eve of the clash against Barça at the Parc des Princes.