A French man arrested in Ukraine last month was planning mass attacks during France’s Euro 2016 soccer tournament, Ukraine’s intelligence agency said Monday.
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The matches begin Friday at Paris’s Stade de France, where Islamic State militants detonated suicide bombs outside a soccer match on November 13.
The strikes “are causing disagreements amongst our compatriots and give an image of France that does not conform to reality, when France is the premier tourist destination in the world”, he told La Voix du Nord newspaper in an interview to be published Tuesday, June 7.
Ukraine security services said he had planned to carry out 15 separate attacks on Euro 2016 with a mosque, synagogue and tax collection office as some of the potential targets.
“The Frenchman spoke negatively about his government’s migration policies, the spread of Islam and globalization”.
Ukrainian authorities released photos of a fair-haired man, with his face blurred, holding various weapons, as well as a video of the arrest that showed SWAT officers dragging him out of a white minivan and putting him on the ground of what appeared to be a parking lot with his face down.
Ukrainian authorities said his arsenal included 125 kilogrammes (275 pounds) of TNT and 100 detonators as well as bullets and grenade launchers.
The SBU said the French man came up on their radar past year during his stay in eastern Ukraine, and where he was ‘trying to establish ties with Ukrainian troops under the guise of volunteering’.
The man detained did not fit the usual profile of an attacker, he said, pointing to the arrest past year of far-right activist Claude Hermant, accused of providing weapons to a jihadist who murdered four people at a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015.
The man has not been formally identified by French authorities, but he is believed to work for an agricultural cooperative inseminating cows in eastern France.
The firm’s technical director Luc Voidey described the man as “an exemplary employee”.
Members of Ukraine’s state security service detain Gregoire Moutaux.
Nicolas Wilt, a farmer who knew him, said he had regularly visited Ukraine as “he told us he had a girlfriend in Ukraine”.
“It’s not a change in terms of the advice about whether or not to travel”, she said. French police are now under pressure after heavy deployment to months of protests over labour reforms, a large ongoing riot police presence at the migrant camp in Calais and six months of a state of emergency which led to night raids and house arrests.
France has mobilised 90,000 security personnel to guard Euro 2016.
The situation has not been helped by a long-running labour dispute.
Make-or-break talks between unions and employers later Monday may decide whether the strikes will affect the influx of football fans from around the continent.
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The SBU chief said the French suspect had been in touch “with military units fighting in Donbass”, a reference to the eastern areas of Luhansk and Donetsk, where pro-Russian rebels have seized large areas of Ukrainian territory.
