Pressure grows on France after Champions League CCTV footage deleted

Stade de France during the Champions League final last month has been deleted, with critics alleging a deliberate cover-up. The French Football Federation revealed Thursday to a commission at the French Senate the images had been destroyed automatically having not been subject to a warrant from judicial authorities, in line with French law. The revelation adds to the controversy after crowd control problems, tear gas and street crime marred the final at Paris' Stade de France between Liverpool and Real Madrid on May 28.

France's reputation has taken a battering as laid out in a government report on Friday. It said the "chain of failures" by French authorities has inflicted "severe damage" on the image of the country. Opposition politicians seized on the latest revelations about the CCTV footage to hammer the authorities.

"It's called covering your tracks," far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen told BFMTV on Friday. "The fact that there is no CCTV footage allows their huge lies to be covered," Le Pen added, pointing to the initial claim from the French government that fake tickets on an 'industrial-scale' caused the pandemonium. Police asked Stade de France for the footage, but only on Thursday evening after it became public that the images had been destroyed, a source close to the case told AFP Friday.

"Yesterday's information that the images would not be kept for one month, but only a few days, led us to ask for them," Bobigny prosecutors, in charge of the investigation into fake tickets, said. The State de France is allowed to store CCTV footage for a maximum of 30 days, but the servers only have the capacity to store them for seven or eight. On Twitter French police said Thursday the images taken by the Stade