Paris police chief Didier Lallement has apologised for tear-gassing supporters who were waiting to enter the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid at the Stade de France.
Speaking at the French Senate on Thursday, he said was sorry for authorising the use of tear gas but felt he had no other option under the circumstances.
Lallement said: "It is obviously a failure. It was a failure because people were pushed around and attacked. It was a failure because the image of the country was undermined."
He provided no evidence for his widely discredited claim that up to 40,000 supporters without tickets or with fake tickets attempted to enter the stadium.
The figure has no scientific virtue but it came from feedback from police and public transport officials," Lallement added. "Maybe I was wrong, but it was constructed from all the information harvested.
Whether there are 30,000 or 40,000 people, it doesn't change anything. What matters is that there were people, in large numbers, likely to disrupt the proper organization of the filtering. But that we count them precisely to within 5000, it doesn't change much."
