‘No plan B’ for Olympics river opening ceremony: French minister

PARIS (AFP): The French government on Monday insisted it would keep a plan to hold the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony on the River Seine even after a deadly attack in the French capital at the weekend amplified security concerns.

Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera told French radio that the plan could still be adapted within the idea of the river flotilla, with media reports indicating grave concern within the security forces that the ceremony could be vulnerable to attack.

A man known to the authorities as a radical Islamist with mental troubles on Saturday stabbed to death a German tourist close to the Eiffel Tower by the River Seine in what prosecutors are investigating as a suspected act of terror.

“There is no plan B, we have a plan A within which we have several alternatives,” the minister told France Inter radio.

She said the “terrorist threat and in particular the Islamist threat exists” but added “it is not new and it is neither specific to France nor specific to the Games”.

Bur she added that there were “a certain number of adjustment variables”, notably the number of spectators who can attend which will be decided in the spring and can be “modulated”.

Also subject to adjustment could be “the number of events which will be authorised around the area and in Paris” on the sidelines of the ceremony and “the management of security perimeters”.

But asked whether any relocation of the ceremony was being considered, she emphasised: “this is not the hypothesis on which we are working”.

For the first time in Olympics history, the opening ceremony is set to take place outside the main athletics stadium, with competitors and officials set to travel through Paris on a flotilla of more than 100 vessels.

The attacker chose the Eiffel Tower area more for its “symbolic” side than as an “Olympic site”, Emmanuel Gregoire, Paris’s first deputy mayor told France Info radio.

Recalling that the Rugby World Cup had been hosted this autumn in Paris and elsewhere in France without “any incident”, he said that it is not “the Olympics… that must be called into question”, but “the way in which we anticipate the risks in treating these individuals.”

“I am sure that we will be able to prepare for these Olympics in a very satisfactory manner,” he added.