A drone swarm calls for a lot of coordination and is ‘much more sensitive to interference’, said Etienne Faury, a general and commander of the air brigade for the permanent surveillance of airspace who is in charge of the anti-drone initiative for the Paris Games.
With that, we saw we had a problem,’ a security source, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said.Īnother issue authorities must consider is the way in which an attack could be mounted, such as a so-called drone swarm where an armada of the small devices suddenly fills the skies, flying in coordination.įor Fouillet though, an attack by militarised swarm requires state capabilities and is not necessarily expected to be the number one threat to the Olympics. ‘It was flying at 140 kilometres an hour (87 miles mph) and could reach several kilometres high up in the sky.
A mere drone owned by a tourist had to be intercepted by law enforcement officers in Paris in 2021. Civilian drone capabilities have been of concern to authorities for some time. ‘You don’t fight military drones in the same way as civilian drones,’ he said. The big issue, explained Fouillet, is ensuring the effectiveness of a system ‘which must be multi-layered’. ‘Systems have evolved since,’ the senior official said. Just a few weeks earlier, a report by senators had highlighted the ‘complex’ and ‘evolving’ nature of the anti-drones battle.Īmong multiple solutions both for detecting drones and their neutralisation, none taken on their own was ‘completely satisfactory’, it said. Nevertheless, on top of concerns about overall security and budget worries for the Paris Games - set to be a centrepiece of President Emmanuel Macron’s second term - there have been questions about its preparedness for dealing with a drone attack.Ī parliamentary information team in summer 2021 raised the alarm about France being insufficiently prepared for such a threat. ‘The Olympic Games are an ideal showcase, (shown) live around the world, and naturally the security services are working on all the scenarios to prevent a possible attack.’ The plan is to take the ceremony out of its customary location in the main stadium and place it in the heart of the capital, with sporting delegations sailing down the river Seine in boats.ĭrones are ‘very clearly a matter of high priority’, the senior official said. The unprecedented opening ceremony planned for the 2024 Paris Olympics already poses a serious security headache. ‘The risk can be transposed to the Olympic Games, it’s no fantasy.’ ‘The hybridisation of civilian drones for military or terrorist use is not new, as we can see in Ukraine among other places,’ Thibault Fouillet, a historian and researcher at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, said. ‘It’s really something we are taking very seriously, we’ve been working on it for a long time,’ a senior French official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.Ī part of warfare for years, drones have become a defining feature of the Ukraine conflict, deployed on a scale never seen before to carry out both surveillance and strikes. Two people were killed and more than 100 injured in the attack, for which a US extremist was jailed.īut the use of civilian drones by armed and criminal groups in recent years poses a new and high-tech nightmare scenario for Olympic organisers. The last terror act at an Olympics was in Atlanta in 1996 when a pipe bomb exploded as revellers enjoyed a rock concert. Fear of a terror attack has haunted every Olympic host nation for half a century since Palestinian gunmen took members of the Israeli team hostage during the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
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