“I have instructed all the prefects of France to strengthen the security of Catholic and Protestant places of worship,” indicated, on the evening of Friday March 29, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin on the social network X, while France has been placed in “Attack Emergency” since Monday. Easter, which commemorates the resurrection of Christ for Christians, is celebrated this Sunday March 31 by Catholics and Protestants, and on May 5 by the Orthodox.
As noted by BFMTV in front of a church in Versailles (Yvelines), the minister’s request to organize a “physical presence” of the police, “systematically” and in front of “all” churches and temples, was put in place.
“Very high” level of terrorist threat
In his note, which AFP was able to consult, Gérald Darmanin called on the prefects to be “extremely vigilant” due to the “very high” level of the terrorist threat, as well as the “persistence of international tensions”. He asked to “insist” on the “visual control of incoming flows for the purposes of detecting suspicious individuals” or to pay “particular attention” to “vehicles parked near places of assembly or worship”.
The terrorist attack that occurred in Moscow on March 22 led Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to “raise the posture of the Vigipirate plan throughout the national territory to the ‘Emergency Attack’ level.” On Monday, he announced that two planned attacks had been foiled in France since the start of the year. One concerned a planned “violent action against a Catholic religious building” by a man “obviously committed to jihadist ideology”, according to the national anti-terrorism prosecution.