Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credit: FABRICE COFFRINI / AFP 3:14 p.m., March 28, 2024

A few months before the opening of the Paris Olympic Games, the police and 160 high school students participated this Thursday in a simulated terrorist attack exercise in the Rodez stadium. The objective was to refine the coordination between emergency services, firefighters and intervention forces. 

Soldiers, police, firefighters, emergency services and 160 high school students took part on Thursday, a few months before the Olympic Games, in an exercise in a stadium in Rodez, the challenge being for the police to neutralize two terrorists shooting at the crowd.

“We have to prepare for it”

“Even if no one wants the worst, we must prepare for it, ensure coordination with the various state services, in the event of a terrorist attack on the territory, and even more so in the run-up to the Olympic Games,” declared after the exercise Colonel Thomas Riou, commander of the 13th demi-brigade of the Foreign Legion, stationed in Aveyron. 

According to the scenario of the exercise, two men entered the Paul-Lignon stadium in Rodez, a 3,000-seat enclosure where the Ligue 2 football team usually plays, and fired in bursts with automatic weapons, causing several deaths and many injured. Amid scenes of panic, the emergency services evacuated high school students acting as the wounded while the military and law enforcement launched the attack. The attackers will be killed in two stages.

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During the Olympic Games, the 13th DBLE will dispatch 800 soldiers to participate in the security system, in support of the internal security forces, like other regiments of the French army. During the months preceding the Games, law enforcement officers carry out preparation exercises in various departments of France, in order to refine coordination between emergency services, firefighters, intervention forces, police and gendarmerie.

Last week, the RAID carried out an exercise in Essonne, aiming to neutralize four terrorists. The recent attack in Moscow, claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) and which left more than 140 dead, led France to raise its alert level to its highest level, as part of the Vigipirate security plan .