French security services have arrested a Chechen teenager suspected of plotting an “Islamist-inspired” attack on a football game during this summer’s Olympics, the interior ministry has said.
The domestic intelligence agency DGSI arrested an 18-year-old of Chechen origin in Saint-Étienne, in south-east France, the ministry said on Friday, calling it the “first foiled attack against the Olympic Games”.
France is on its highest alert level for attacks before the Paris Games, for which about 10 million visitors and 10,000 athletes are expected.
The events will mainly take place in the capital but other towns and cities around France will host some sports and individual games.
The ministry said the arrested man was suspected of “actively preparing an attack against the Geoffroy-Guichard Stadium [in Saint-Étienne] during the football games that will take place there. He intended to attack spectators but also security forces and die as a martyr.”
The revelations could set nerves jangling in France where organisers have faced persistent questions about the risk of an attack that would seriously tarnish the world’s biggest sporting event.
Most concerns have focused on the opening ceremony on 26 July, which will take place over a four-mile stretch of the Seine – the first time a summer Olympics has begun outside the athletics stadium.
Policing such a vast area of the capital represents a huge challenge: 45,000 officers will be on duty and large swathes of the centre will be out of bounds for everyone except ticket holders and local residents.
France has been targeted by Islamist attackers over the last decade, often by individuals inspired by al-Qaida or Islamic State (IS). In October last year a radicalised 20-year-old Chechen, who had sworn allegiance to IS, killed a teacher in the northern French town of Arras.
In March, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, told a French senate commission that the type of risk under assessment for the period of the Olympics included the possibility of a move by a lone attacker in France, or groups outside France paying criminals inside the country to stage an attack.
Darmanin said there was no specific threat from a foreign group at that point. “We can say today that groups such as al-Qaida or Islamic State have the intention to attack the west, and France in particular, but they don’t have the means at the moment.” But, he added, intelligence was not a “precise science”.
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Céline Berthon, the French domestic intelligence chief, told the same senate commission that the terrorism risk had been increasing for more than a year. She spoke of “the return of an Islamist terrorism threat linked to external theatres, which we must not lose sight of, amid a tense geopolitical context, with terrorist organisations who target the west and will no doubt, as the event approaches, seize the opportunity which the Games are”.
The Olympic torch relay is under way in France, involving a “security bubble” of 100 officers including anti-drone specialists and anti-terror police.
During the first three weeks of the 7,500-mile (12,000km) trip, 78 people were arrested for trying to disrupt the relay and 30 suspect drones were intercepted, according to figures from the interior ministry this week.
The Olympics have been attacked in the past, most infamously in 1972 in Munich and again in 1996 in Atlanta.
