Hannover’s police chief says authorities have cancelled the friendly soccer match because they had “concrete information” about a bomb threat. Germany played France on Friday during the terrorist attacks that included suicide bombers outside the stadium.
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The Minister of the Interior for the state of Lower Saxony, Boris Pistorius, said the decision to call off the game was not taken lightly.
Thousands of fans were evacuated, without signs of panic, from Hanover’s HDI Arena, as hundreds of police, a few on horseback, secured the area.
German police have so far found no explosives or made any arrests, despite media reports to the contrary.
Dagmar Freitag, president of the sports committee of the German parliament, said the Hannover incident will “surely have an influence” on sports events and the Bundesliga but that “we’ll have to react in a level-headed way”.
“I am asking for an advance of trust from the German people. We will have such cases in the future, maybe not Hanover but somewhere else”, he said.
The German chancellor Angela Merkel and members of the German cabinet were expected to have been among the guests at the match.
Two French players had more personal connections to the Paris attacks: Lassana Diarra’s cousin was killed and Antoine Griezmann’s sister escaped from the Bataclan concert hall where 89 died. “That our team would twice in four days have to experience this kind of tragic event is something that previously I could never have imagined”, German soccer official Reinhard Rauball said.
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“My impression is that football in Germany has taken a different turn in every facet as of today”, Rauball said. Merkel and other government officials were scheduled to attend the game. The Stade de France, where the German national team were playing a friendly against France, was one of the venues targeted. Head coach Joachim Loew had called the planned match “a clear message and symbol of freedom and a demonstration of compassion, as well as sorrow, for our French friends – not only in France, but throughout the world”.
