More than 700 police officers will be deployed Wednesday evening in the Spanish city of Valencia (east) for the match between the local basketball team and Israeli club Maccabi Tel-Aviv in the Euroleague, due to the conflict in the Middle East, announced the authorities.
The match having been declared “high risk” by the authorities, “the presence of security and police personnel” will be reinforced and “participants will be subject to more exhaustive security checks”, the club announced in a press release Valencia basketball court.
“We have set up a global operation in which more than 700 members of the national police will work, in uniform and in civilian clothes,” explained the prefect of Valencia, Pilar Bernabé, during a press conference.
“I would also like to ask supporters (…) to show a little patience, because access will be more controlled this time,” added Ms. Bernabé.
This Euroleague match scheduled for 8:30 p.m. takes place in a context of fears of attacks in Europe due to the war between Israel and Hamas triggered by the unprecedented attack of the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7 against the Hebrew state.
More than 1,400 people have been killed in Israel, most of them civilians who died on the day of the Hamas attack. Israeli retaliatory strikes on the Gaza Strip have killed more than 3,000 people, mostly Palestinian civilians, according to local authorities.
Fears of attacks were revived by the attack on Monday evening in Brussels on the sidelines of the football match between Belgium and Sweden and claimed by the Islamic State group, during which a man killed two Swedish citizens.
This context pushed the Spanish Ministry of the Interior to announce “a series of” “complementary” security measures, even if Madrid maintained at this stage its anti-terrorism alert at an unchanged level of 4 out of 5, corresponding to a risk “ pupil”.
