Interview by Wilfried Devillers, edited by Gauthier Delomez
“All of a sudden from all sides, an avalanche of people”, says a Frenchwoman, present during the serious incidents which broke out on the sidelines of a football match in Indonesia. On Saturday, at least 125 people died, including 32 children, authorities said. Thiphaine Poulon is the companion of one of the players of the losing team that evening, and whose angry supporters invaded the pitch. She testifies for Europe 1 of the course of this dramatic evening, and of the anguish she experienced.
“My boyfriend was walking home, and in fact, he was jumped on by a dozen supporters who insulted him, nudged him…”, she explains.
Taken with her spouse to the locker room of the opposing team
Following these first incidents, the police “started to pull out the tear gas canisters. I don’t know what their gas was, it was so thick that it really went up in the air to us”, remembers the Frenchwoman. “The crowd ran off and went back to the stands to leave. And suddenly, the security asked us to come down and they made us go into the locker room of the opposing team,” she recalls. .
The Frenchwoman adds that she and her spouse “stayed for about two hours stranded in this room, without a network, without anything. We just had news from time to time from security who came to tell us ‘there are ten dead’ , ‘there are 20 dead’, ‘there are 30 dead’, ‘there are 40 dead’, and we stopped at that figure”, specifies the young woman.
The forces of order mobilized
Once outside, she and her companion saw “all the police – the army, the stadium security, the police – they were all sitting on the ground and nobody was talking”, she describes. They were breathing very hard, they were coughing, some were bleeding. It was in the morning when we woke up that we saw that there were 59 dead”, underlines the young Frenchwoman.
According to a latest report on Monday, this stampede resulted in the death of 125 people, including 32 children, and injured more than 300. The city’s police chief was fired, and nine officers were suspended.