‘Bulls**t’: French senator slams ‘liar’ Gérald Darmanin over blame of Liverpool fans at Champions League final

The co-chairman of the inquiry into the carnage which took place at UEFA Champions League final at the Stade de France in May has labelled French minister of the interior Gérald Darmanin’s version of events ‘bulls***’, in a stinging rebuttal of a government figurehead who tried to blame Liverpool supporters for the fiasco.

Reds fans including women, children and the disabled were tear gassed, hit with riot shields by police forces and robbed by armed gangs of local youths at European football’s showpiece event, with a French senate investigation currently underway in order to ascertain the cause of the problems which left some supporters traumatised and others with serious injuries.

Darmanin and sport minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéa launched a propaganda assault on Liverpool fans in the aftermath, seeking to protect the reputation of French authorities by passing the buck to supporters themselves. Before the senate, Darmanin claimed that fans arrived late, were drunken, and that up to 40,000 attempted to enter the stadium without valid tickets. He cited an industrial scale ‘massive fraud’ as the cause of the disorder.

The minister’s version of events has been largely derided in France, though, with a poll finding that 76 percent of French people thought he was lying in his testimony to the senate. French daily newspaper Libération, meanwhile, depicted Darmanin as Pinocchio with an enlarged nose caused by lying in one of its front pages. At no point has Darmanin provided a scrap of evidence proving his version of events, while French authorities allowed CCTV evidence from the stadium to be ‘automatically’ deleted rather than providing it to the inquiry to be examined.

Now one of the two co-chairs of the inquiry senator