French police have arrested seven Spanish Christians for a peaceful protest over the Olympic Games opening ceremony. They drove around Paris in a bus emblazoned with the words STOP ATTACKS ON CHRISTIANS and images of the ceremony’s scenes that offended millions of Christians as well as Muslim nations.
The bus was driven around the city for 10-hours without incident from 9am on Monday (August 5) before law enforcement officers surrounded it and stopped it at gunpoint and arrested those on board. The protesters were reportedly handcuffed, strip-searched, denied access to their devices, and held in police custody overnight without food or water on “non-existent charges”.
Christian campaigner Carole Farrow told Premier Christian News they were subjected to “severe psychological pressure” and illegally denied contact with lawyers and family members. She claimed the police were under orders from “high-level political authorities” despite the activists “not violating any local laws”.
Those arrested were members of CitizenGO, a Madrid-based conservative advocacy group that engages in activism primarily by circulating online petitions. One of them posted on social media: “They escorted our bus out of Paris shortly after unjustly arresting us. They are tyrannical, anti-Christian bullies. It’s absurd.”
The protestors were released after twelve hours in police custody. The Paris public prosecutor’s office said it had lifted the custody order and closed the case “due to an irregularity as the time limit for presentation to a judicial police officer was too late and the reason for the arrests was not sufficiently precise.”
CitizenGO quoted a French lawyer who said: “It appears impossible to constitute the crime of failing to communicate a protest because there is no protest in the presence of one unique vehicle. The prosecutor pushed the law to its limits to stop the bus and limit their free speech. Moreover, the procedure was irregular.”
The bus protest was linked to a CitizenGO petition demanding an apology from the International Olympic Committee for its opening ceremony. It read in part: “We’ve just been humiliated on the world stage! Our Christian faith was openly mocked in the most offensive way imaginable. This grotesque spectacle was an affront to everything we hold sacred, and it cannot go unchallenged.”
“This was a deliberate and vicious parody humiliating our most cherished beliefs as Christians. They know we are an easy target. And until we stop them, they will keep doing it. This is about standing up for our faith and ensuring that such blatant profanity is never repeated. What happens if we stay silent? Our faith, our Christian symbols, will become a permanent parody promoted by LGBT lobbies, backed by our globalist leaders and the international left,” the petition continued. It had received nearly 400,000 signatures as of Thursday (August 8).
CitizenGO founder Ignacio Arsuaga alleged, without evidence, that police were dispatched to stop the bus by a French prosecutor under the orders of French President Emmanuel Macron. He added that his organisation plans to file a lawsuit against the president, the prosecutor and the French police. “Woke governments are becoming increasingly totalitarian,” he declared.
