LAST UPDATE | 30 Jun 2023
FRANCE’S INTERIOR MINISTRY has said that bus and tram services will be halted nationwide at 9pm tonight, and sales of large fireworks banned, in order to quash violent protests sparked by the killing of a teenager by police.
The statement said that regional prefects, who are in charge of security around the country, would also be asked to ban the sale and transport of petrol cans, acids and other inflammable liquids.
Additionally, French police will use armoured vehicles to suppress riots, according to Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
“Additional mobile forces” would be deployed along with the vehicles belonging to France’s gendarmerie, Borne said, also announcing the cancellation of “large-scale events binding personnel and potentially posing risks to public order”.
A curfew for bus and tram services in Paris has already been introduced and will come into force from 9pm each evening as authorities are scrambling to contain the riots that have arisen in response to a police officer fatally shooting a teenager.
The regional transport authority in the French capital said that the early shutdown is “for the safety of our workers and passengers”, following attacks on transport and public infrastructure during the violence.
The teen’s death has revived longstanding grievances about policing and racial profiling in France’s low-income and multiethnic suburbs.
The French government has rejected accusations by the UN of racism among its police.
“Any accusation of racism or systemic discrimination in the police force in France is totally unfounded,” the foreign ministry said.
Earlier Friday, UN human rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said “we are concerned by the killing of a 17-year-old of North African descent by police in France on Tuesday”.
“This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement,” she said at a media briefing in Geneva.
French authorities have not released any information about the ethnic background of the victim, identified simply as Nahel, but his mother referred to him as Arab in a television interview.
In her first media interview since the shooting, Nahel’s mother, Mounia, told the France 5 channel: “I don’t blame the police, I blame one person: the one who took the life of my son.”
She said the 38-year-old officer responsible, who was detained and charged with voluntary manslaughter yesterday, “saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life”.
French President Emmanuel Macron led a crisis meeting of minister today after a third night of protests yesterday evening saw hundreds of arrests made, cars torched, and shops ransacked.
He has said that a greater number of police will be deployed today to handle any future riots.
The Elysee announced Macron would cut short a trip to Brussels, where he was attending a European Union summit, to chair a crisis meeting on the violence– the second such emergency talks in as many days.
Macron today called on parents to keep child rioters off the streets, adding that around a third of the 875 people arrested overnight for rioting were “young, or very young”.
“It’s the responsibility of parents to keep them at home,” he told reporters after the crisis security meeting.
“It’s not the state’s job to act in their place,” he added, while urging social media firms to remove the “most sensitive” content related to the rioting.
Public buildings were also targeted, with a police station in the Pyrenees city of Pau hit with a Molotov cocktail, according to regional authorities, and an elementary school and a district office set on fire in Lille.
French security forces arrested 667 people overnight, the interior minister announced.
Around 40,000 police and gendarmes- along with elite Raid and GIGN units – were deployed in several cities overnight, with curfews issued in municipalities around Paris and bans on public gatherings in Lille and Tourcoing in the country’s north.
Armoured police vehicles rammed through the charred remains of cars that had been flipped and set ablaze in the northwestern Paris suburb of Nanterre, where a police officer shot the teenage delivery driver, who is only being identified by his first name, Nahel.
Despite the massive security deployment, violence and damage were reported in multiple areas.
The memorial march for Nahel on Tuesday, led by Mounia, ended with riot police firing tear gas as several cars were set alight in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the teenager lived and was killed.
Multiple public buildings were also targeted in Seine-Saint-Denis, in the Paris metro area, according to a police source.
In the suburb of Drancy, rioters used a truck to force open the entrance to a shopping centre, which was then partly looted and burned, a police source said.
The government is desperate to avoid a repeat of 2005 urban riots, sparked by the death of two boys of African origin in a police chase, during which 6,000 people were arrested.
Nahel was killed as he pulled away from police who were trying to stop him for a traffic infraction.
A video, authenticated by AFP, showed two police officers standing by the side of the stationary car, with one pointing a weapon at the driver.
A voice is heard saying: “You are going to get a bullet in the head.”
The police officer then appears to fire as the car abruptly drives off.
The police officer accused of pulling the trigger was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met”.
Clashes first erupted as the video emerged, contradicting police accounts that the teenager was driving at the officer.
The officer’s lawyer, Laurent-Franck Lienard, told BFMTV late yesterday that his client had apologised as he was taken into custody.
“The first words he pronounced were to say sorry, and the last words he said were to say sorry to the family,” Lienard said.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say