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Violence erupted in Paris following PSG’s victory against Arsenal in the Champions League final in Budapest on 30 May, which saw the French side beat their English competitors on penalties.
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More than 890 people were arrested in connection with the celebrations, France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told France Inter.
Paris’ Public Prosecutor’s Office said 225 adults and 87 minors were taken into police custody on the night of Saturday into Sunday, whilst three people died: two men who fell into the River Seine and a third who was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Scores were also injured, including police officers who were struck by shrapnel.
Images have emerged online showing flares being set off, vehicles and bikes burning on roads and people smashing shopfronts. Police officers can also be seen firing tear gas to disperse crowds.
But amid reams of real footage, plenty of fakes have surfaced too, in an apparent effort to push the narrative that “Paris is burning” and inflate the scale of the violence that broke out in parts of the French capital.
One example is a video that many social media users say shows the Eiffel Tower on fire and puts the blame on immigrants.
However, if we look at the account that originally shared the clip, we can see that he says the tower is shrouded in smoke following the start of a fire on the banks of the Seine nearby.
He does not say that the iconic monument itself is burning, and there have been no official police reports stating that.
Another video circulating widely shows overturned cars, street fires, and people smashing up a bus stop.
The caption uses xenophobic language to allege that immigrants have destroyed the French capital over a football match.
However, this video is old and does not show violence in Paris following the PSG-Arsenal game.
In fact, Euronews’ fact-checking team, The Cube, has already debunked it once before: it circulated on social media in early April this year, allegedly showing a riot that had just broken out. But in reality, the video dates back to 2022, in the aftermath of a shooting against Paris’ Kurdish community.
Furious protests broke out after that attack, in which three people were killed, and others were wounded, in a shooting that the French authorities say was a racially motivated hate crime.
Yet another old video is doing the rounds online with captions saying that “shirtless Sri Lankan men” were smashing coconuts in the streets of Paris and making a mess following the match. Like many of the other posts, it blames “open borders” and immigration policy.
But the clip actually depicts the annual Ganesh festival, which falls in August or September, depending on the year, and has been celebrated by Paris’ Tamil community for around 30 years.
So it’s wrong to suggest that this has anything to do with the violence that took place in the capital. Reports also state that participants and private companies clean up the streets following the event.
