France Denies Accreditation to Russian and Belarusian Journalists for Olympics as Potential Spies
The French authorities have refused to allow nearly 100 foreigners from Russia and Belarus who intended to work at the Olympics as journalists, physiotherapists and technical staff to participate in the 2024 Games, fearing they could be potential spies. French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said this in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche.
French law enforcement agencies and intelligence services have checked nearly a million applications for accreditation for the Summer Olympics in Paris, which start next Friday, BFMTV reports.
According to French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanen, a total of 960,000 administrative checks were carried out on people (athletes, coaches, journalists, volunteers, private security guards or even those close to the opening ceremony), resulting in the rejection of 4,340 people from among the delegations and staff hired to organise the Olympics.
The French interior minister added that some ‘about a hundred people were suspected of working for other countries, including those from Russia and Belarus, but also from other countries’.
The minister noted that among these more than 4,000 rejected applications, 359 people have been ordered to leave the territory of France, and there are hundreds of people with the status of ‘potentially dangerous’ (257 radical Islamists, 181 far-left and 95 far-right).
Furthermore, as the opening ceremony approached, Dermanen said that ‘neither our intelligence services nor the foreign services with which we cooperate have identified any external threat’, but stressed the need to ‘remain very focused’.
This year's Summer Olympics will be held in Paris from 26 July to 11 August.