France’s former interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, has somewhat apologised for blaming Liverpool supporters for the dangerous situation at the 2022 Champions League final, but it has been described as a “non-apology.”
Before the 2022 Champions League final in Paris, a dangerous crush built up outside the turnstiles as Liverpool supporters waited to enter the Stade de France.
After the match, fans were mugged and robbed by criminals en masse who targeted the leaving supporters.
As the crush built up outside the ground, UEFA and French authorities put the blame on hooligans and fans with supposedly counterfeit tickets.
In reality, supporters were forced into a bottleneck and treated with brutality while local criminals broke into the stadium.
Despite journalists presenting the truth, the fabrications were repeated in French government, particularly by then Interior Minister Darmanin.
He is now the Minister of Justice in France and has apologised to some extent on the Legend YouTube channel.
“I arrived at the stadium in a strange atmosphere, but when you’re the Minister of the Interior, you enter through the parking lot, you don’t really see the confusion,” he said.
“I’m told there’s a crowd movement, ‘It’s Liverpool, a huge club, but it’s also English hooliganism. Our initial analysis is they’re causing trouble’.
“That’s what I learned at the security desk, that’s what the police chief who has since joined me told me, and that’s what the footage shows. We also caught guys with counterfeit tickets because at the time they were paper tickets. Counterfeit tickets had been sold and were blocking the entrance.”
An independent panel inquiry has since found that to be wholly false, saying: “Assertions regarding huge numbers of ticketless supporters, and those with fake tickets, have been wrongly inflated and have been stated as fact, to deflect responsibility for the planning and operational failures of stakeholders.
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“This is reprehensible and has involved UEFA, UEFA Events SA, FFF, the Prefecture de Police, Government Officials and French Ministers.
“Based upon the wealth of evidence we have obtained from eyewitnesses and footage, the Panel has concluded that there is no evidence of an abnormally large number of ‘ticketless supporters’ or supporters with invalid tickets, in the vicinity.”
Despite seemingly apologising for the falsehoods perpetuated, Darmanin couldn’t help but repeat the lie that counterfeit tickets and police assaults had contributed.
The Justice Minister continued: “The culprit was easy, and I apologise to the Liverpool fans.
“The combination of all this nonsense, the broken RER that forced people from Liverpool into a single entrance, the fact that tickets disrupted the flow, and the crime we didn’t know how to manage meant that during my first public outing, I said what I was told, ‘The English are causing trouble’.
“It wasn’t entirely false because there had been counterfeit tickets and police assaults, but it wasn’t true in the literal sense of the word. The primary cause of the problem was the criminals attacking people going to the Stade de France.”
As you can tell by the tone of his apology, he is attempting to shift the blame again.
Journalist Dan Austin, who has covered in depth the final’s events and subsequent cover-up, wrote on X: “This is the same non-apology Darmanin gave in the summer of 2022.
“It is insincere – as evidenced by his decision to persist with what he knew full well were lies – and the main focus is still on shifting blame, just to an alternative target.
“A complete and utter coward of a man.”
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