False alarm leads to major police operation in Paris

False alarm leads to major police operation in Paris

Eyewitnesses described panicked crowds and a huge police presence during a major security operation in central Paris on Saturday (September 17), which turned out to be triggered by a false alarm.

The operation centred on the church of Saint Leu-Saint Gilles in a busy shopping district, with police warning locals to avoid the area and telling local businesses to close up and hide customers.

Saba Nouira works in the “Genereux” restaurant opposite the church and said that she first knew something was going on when she saw crowds of people running in the street.

“I was here in the restaurant and then there was a moment of panic. We saw that everyone was running, the police, the people, they said ‘Go on, go on,’ pushing people all over the place. And there was a moment of panic and we had customers in the restaurant and they told us to hide, to put the people in the cellar. We protected them because there were girls who were almost collapsing,” she told Reuters TV.

France is on high alert for security threats after a series of attacks by Islamist militants that have killed more than 230 people since January 2015.

Pascal Baroukh works in a clothes shop opposite the church, and he said that the recent spate of attacks has put people in Paris on edge.

“People are definitely traumatised, me just like everyone else and among my friends we talk about it all the time. That’s the topic of conversation these days, seeing things that are unacceptable which we’ve never seen before. People are scared,” he said.

Interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, issued a statement confirming the false alarm and said that “the circumstances around the intervention” had yet to be determined.

More than one hundred police officers, including elite units, carried out the operation and the area was reopened to traffic after it became evident that there was no danger, a Reuters witness said.

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