The investigation into the incidents on the sidelines of the Champions League final at the Stade de France is becoming more complicated. CCTV images of the sports enclosure were not kept, explained a representative of the French Football Federation (FFF) to the senators, angering Bastien Lachaud, LFI deputy in Seine-Saint-Denis.
“There must be a follow-up … How could such a scandal have happened, how could these images have been destroyed?” Asks the elected official, who believes that it is “a scandal”. “In the best case, it is incompetence. In the worst case, it is a desire to obstruct the work of justice. In both cases, the responsibility of the government is engaged.”
The FFF representative clarified that these images had self-destructed for lack of having been claimed by the judicial authority. According to the law, the retention period of these images must not exceed one month and it is proportionate in each case by a prefectural decree. But in reality, the images are only kept for a few days: the cameras film continuously, and the images crash as they go.
When there is an incident, the capture of video surveillance images must be the first reflex, allowing verifications to be carried out and possible disciplinary or criminal proceedings to be launched. At that time, the images can be kept longer, the time of the procedure. However, the prefect of police, Didier Lallement, would have seized the public prosecutor only on the basis ofmassive counterfeit fraud, a widely contested thesis. He never accompanied his request with video surveillance images when they could have highlighted possible intrusions, thefts, assaults or crowd movements.
Faced with the controversy that was mounting last night, the police headquarters said that it had kept the images from its cameras and that it held them at the disposal of justice.
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