Olympics security means minorities and others flagged as potential terror threats can’t move freely

Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — They are Nabil, Amine, François and more. But they will not be seen around the Paris Olympics, because France’s government barred them from getting anywhere close.

French authorities are making unprecedentedly broad use of discretionary powers under an anti-terror law to keep hundreds of people they deem to be potential security threats away from the biggest event modern France has ever organized.

Minorities — largely with backgrounds in former French colonies — are often among those forbidden from leaving their neighborhoods and required to report daily to police, their lawyers say. Some are alarmed by the sweeping use of what one described as “a terribly dangerous tool.”

Some of those now restricted in their movements, with orders that don’t require prior approval from judges, include a man who had mental health issues in the past but is now receiving treatment. There also is an apprentice bank worker and business student who believes he’s been targeted in part because he’s Muslim and his father was born in Morocco, plus a halal food delivery driver who risks losing his job because he is banned from straying far from home during the 2024 Olympics and ensuing Paralympics, their lawyers say.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin says the restrictions aim to prevent “very dangerous” people from attacking the Games.

Darmanin says he’s applied them to more than 500 people this year as part of France’s security preparations for the Games and the Olympic torch relay that preceded the July 26 opening ceremony.

Those affected include Amine, the bank apprentice now forbidden from leaving his suburb south of Paris — except to report at 6:30 p.m. daily to a local police station. The France-born 21-year-old has no criminal record and has not been charged with any crime, he and his lawyer say.

Amine believes French intelligence services have mistaken him for someone else who posted decapitation images and threats against LGBTQ+ people on a video-sharing app. The Associated Press is not identifying Amine by his full name because he fears potential employers and schools may reject him if they learn that police flagged him as a threat.

“I am not dangerous for France. I am not a terrorist. I am just a student who works to finance his studies,” Amine said in an interview at his studio apartment strewn with books and with family photos on the fridge.

Police visited twice in the last four months. They busted down a neighbor’s door the first time, seemingly because they had the wrong address, and then seized Amine’s phone and computer, which made boning up for his exams harder, he said. The second time, a month before the Games, was to notify him that he could no longer move around freely.

“If my name was Brian, if I was blond and blue-eyed, the situation would have been different. Except that it is not the case. I am a North African Muslim, and I’ve been targeted in France,” he said.

Fearing terror attacks, French authorities have massively ramped up security for the Games, flooding Paris streets with up to 45,000 police, plus soldiers armed with assault rifles, and tasking intelligence services to identify and neutralize potential threats in advance.

Interior Ministry notes seen by AP say security services foiled several alleged terror plots ahead of the Games, with Olympic soccer matches, an LGBTQ+ night club and France’s Jewish community among suspected targets. The ministry’s notes also say the Israel-Hamas war has heightened the terror risk in France, which has the largest Muslim and Jewish communities in Europe.

The anti-terror preventive effort also includes the liberal use of police powers to restrict the movements of people the ministry deems to be potential threats. The measures can only be challenged afterward in court, which some of those affected are now doing — a few successfully.

The powers were part of reinforced anti-terror legislation that sped through both houses of parliament in 2017, when France was still reeling from attacks by al-Qaida and Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers in 2015.

The attacks killed 147 people — including in Paris neighborhoods now teeming with Olympic visitors and outside what is now the Olympic stadium, hosting track and field and rugby sevens.

The anti-terror law empowers France’s interior minister to restrict anyone’s movements when there are “serious reasons” to believe they’re a grave security threat and have terror ties or sympathies.

A powerful security tool for the Games

The power the interior minister is using to distance people from the Olympics by forcing them to stay close to home is called an “individual measure of administrative control and surveillance,” known by the French acronym, MICAS.

Darmanin told reporters last week that “just under 200” of the more than 500 Olympic-related MICAS cases he ordered this year are still in force during the Games.

They have been applied to people with “possible” extremist links who served jail time and others who weren’t sentenced but “represent a danger for us,” he said.

“We have evidence or very important suspicions that they are radicalized and could prepare an attack,” the interior minister said.

Paris’ chief of police, Laurent Nuñez described the restrictions’ wide use as “extremely positive.”

“We must use the full range of legal and administrative tools at our disposal, which is what the interior minister asked for,” he said last week as he toured the venue for Olympic table tennis, weightlifting, handball and volleyball.

“He asked us to further tighten the net as we approached the Olympic Games, and that is what we did,” Nuñez said.

Lawyers say authorities are abusing the restrictions

AP spoke to six lawyers for about 20 people whose movements have been restricted. Some said they understand the measures’ use for Olympic security, while others say the powers are being applied too broadly.

The use of the restrictions for the Olympics appears unprecedented in scope, some lawyers say. While over 500 people saw their movements curtailed this year and Darmanin says it’s now less than 200 remaining during the Games, that compares with 205 people subjected to MICAS restrictions in the first 26 months of the 2017 law going into effect, according to a French Senate report from 2020.

“It’s really directly connected to the Olympic Games,” said Paris attorney Margot Pugliese. She described the powers as “a horror” and “really the total failure of the rule of law” because they can only be contested in court after they have been applied.

“It is a terribly dangerous tool whenever there is a repressive government,” Pugliese said.

Lawyers say some of their clients have no prior convictions and only tenuous links to suspected extremism. Of the lawyers AP spoke to, about half of their clients have immigrant backgrounds, mostly with family roots in North Africa.

Darmanin says minorities aren’t being singled out and that people suspected of left- or right-wing extremism are under surveillance, too.

“What would the French people say, what would the world say, if people who we can suspect might carry out actions, who are radicalized, are left perfectly free and then commit attacks?” he asked.

Paris attorney Antoine Ory has represented three people hit by MICAS restrictions in the Olympics run-up — two of them with no criminal records. One was born in Madagascar; the other two are French Algerian and French Moroccan dual nationals.

One of the men completed a five-year sentence for terror-related offenses in 2021, which included four months of jail time and other periods of semi-liberty or with an electronic bracelet to flag his whereabouts, Ory says. The MICAS order bans him from leaving his northeastern suburb of Paris.

Ory says police intelligence used to justify restrictions for his two other clients was flimsy at best. He alleges that intelligence services dipped back into old information they long had at their disposal, targeting people who before the Games weren’t deemed enough of a risk to warrant MICAS orders.

“It’s extremely abusive,” he said. “Two weeks before the Games, they come along and say, ‘You’re dangerous.'”

A week before the Olympic opening ceremony, Ory successfully overturned the MICAS order for his Madagascar-born client. A court southeast of Paris ruled that the Interior Ministry failed to prove that the man is a terror risk and ordered the state to pay him 1,500 euros ($1,600).

A police mix-up?

A note from police intelligence services — seen by AP — that requested movement restrictions and daily police check-ins for Amine from July 1 to the Sept. 8 closing of the Paralympics cited “the particularly serious threat he represents to public security and order, his adherence to radical Islam, and the specific context of the terrorist threat in the framework of the organization of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

The note flagged a TikTok video that Amine posted on Oct. 10 of himself in front of the Eiffel Tower, which was lit in Israeli colors following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas militants. Wearing the shirt of Deportivo Palestino, a Chilean soccer club founded by Palestinians, and the motorcycle helmet he’d worn on his ride to the tower, Amine then posted photos of himself making obscene gestures at the monument.

In hindsight, “it wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had,” he acknowledges. Amine says he was frustrated that French authorities at the time were banning pro-Palestinian protests. “It seemed like a lack of impartiality to me,” he said.

He also posted an image of himself with one finger pointing at the badge on his shirt and another pointing at the Star of David illuminating the tower. The intelligence services’ MICAS request described the raised finger as a sign of allegiance to Allah.

Amine says he was copying soccer players he’s seen raise fingers in celebration when they score goals. “But when it’s them, it’s not a problem,” he said.

The police note also tied Amine to an account on the video-sharing app Rave, saying the user posted decapitation images and “worrying comments” that expressed a desire to join a terror group and kill LGBTQ+ people. The note alleged that Amine “does not hide his anti-Zionist and homophobic positions.”

Amine told AP that the Rave account isn’t his. He filed a police complaint in May that the account’s user had stolen his identity.

“I am not at all anti-Zionist, homophobic or anything. All those ideas are alien to me,” Amine said.

The MICAS order — seen by AP — that bars Amine from leaving his Paris suburb except for his daily police check-in warns that he risks three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros ($48,600) if he violates the restrictions or fails to check in.

Stuck at home or close to it, Amine says each day is like the last. He can watch the Paris Olympics only on TV.

And although the Olympic opening ceremony celebrated France’s freedoms, Amine feels that its promises of “liberté, egalité, fraternité” aren’t being applied to him.

“I have neither liberty, nor fraternity towards me,” he said.

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AP video journalists Ahmed Hatem, Alex Turnbull and Jeffrey Schaeffer and Special Projects and Operations manager Thomas Rowley contributed.