French National Police violently arrested a Hell’s Kitchen man after he tried to take a photo with an Israeli flag outside an Olympic venue, the wounded tourist told The Post.
Neil Frias, who is Jewish, was posing for a selfie with the Israeli flag outside the Olympic Aquatics Center in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis when a trio of cops began interrogating him and asked if he was “inciting a riot, or a protest,” he recalled.
The officers demanded to know why he was taking a picture, according to a complaint made to the Inspector General of the National Police about the July 30 incident.
The cops seized Frias’ phone and “tried to rip” his flag, according to the complaint.
Frias, 35, was sent on his way after the cops verified his passport and saw he had a ticket to attend the France-Japan water polo match that afternoon.
Roughly 15 minutes later, however, as Frias stood in line at the facility’s main entrance to have his ticket scanned, a different group of five cops suddenly tackled him, he recalled.
Frias asked in French why the police were arresting him, with one of the officers allegedly responding that it was because he was “resisting,” the complaint read.
Cops shoved him against a tree before dragging him by his feet to the police van, causing bruising and bleeding, according to the complaint and photos of injuries shared with The Post.
“I came to Paris to support the Israeli team and be proudly united with the Olympics,” Frias, who had been volunteering with the Israeli Defense Forces for three months ahead of his Paris trip, told The Post.
“I am deeply disheartened with the fact of how the French National Police treated this whole situation and psychologically abused me.”
At the Saint-Denis police station, where Frias was detained for 27 hours, cops allegedly humiliated the battered visitor by telling him “to go drink the toilet water” and taking pictures of him with their cell phones, according to the complaint.
Frias said it took several hours to connect him with a translator, who ended up speaking Spanish, to explain his rights to an attorney.
Meanwhile, he waited eight hours before receiving medical attention, where he said the doctor diagnosed him with a sprain at the top of his spinal cord and a fractured rib.
Frias was charged with violently resisting arrest and trespassing onto a sports venue while drunk, according to a criminal summons. He denied both charges.
“I cannot restrain myself from thinking it has something to do with him taking one picture of himself with an Israeli flag,” Frias’ lawyer, David Cazeneuve, said, seething over the fact that a number of anti-Israel protesters who waved Palestinian flags and booed the Jewish state during its match against Mali were not immediately arrested like his client.
“There have been very odd things on this side.”
The National Police referred queries to the Bobigny district prosecutor, Eric Mathias, who did not respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Isabel Vincent
