Two inebriated Americans were spotted sleeping atop the famed Eiffel Tower in Paris on Monday (Aug 13) after eluding security the night before, according to the monument’s operator on Tuesday. Security guards woke the guys up “early morning” while they were conducting their normal rounds before the iconic tourist attraction’s opening hour of 9:00 a.m., according to publicly-owned Eiffel Tower operator Sete. They “appear to have gotten stuck because of how drunk they were,” according to a Paris prosecutor.
The drunk American guys had spent their illegal night under the stars in a region between the tower’s second and third levels that is typically not open to the public, but “did not pose any apparent threat,” Sete added. According to a police source, the tourists crossed security barriers while descending the stairs from the tower’s summit after purchasing an access ticket at about 10:40 p.m. on Sunday. Firefighters, including a specialized squad for retrieving people from perilous heights, were dispatched to apprehend the intruders, according to the police source.
The Eiffel Tower was evacuated and closed to the public for over two hours on August 12 as a precautionary measure following a bomb threat
Both men were taken to a police station in Paris’s 7th district for questioning, and Sete stated that they would file a criminal complaint against the intruders. The event caused the iconic site to be closed to the public for about an hour on Monday morning. The Eiffel Tower was evacuated and closed to the public for over two hours on Saturday (August 12) as a precautionary measure following a bomb threat. According to the French daily newspaper Le Parisien, a vast security cordon had been formed, traffic had been redirected, and the monument had also been evacuated. However, about two hours later, a French police source issued a statement saying, “It was a false alarm, people can return inside.”
Some tourists who visited the famed Paris landmark in droves during the high summer season complained about the two-hour closure. They had waited in a nearly 100-meter line at one of the doors before the threat was canceled. The last bomb threat at the Eiffel Tower came in September 2020, and it was an anonymous call to the police that caused a two-hour evacuation of the tower. An email containing a bomb threat against the 330-meter (1080-foot) steel skyscraper was submitted to three Paris police stations on Monday, but officers advised against evacuating it.