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01-07-2023
PARIS: France’s government was set to examine “all options” for restoring order on Friday after nationwide unrest escalated overnight into the most destructive rioting since police shot and killed a teenager at a traffic stop.
Hundreds of police were injured and hundreds of people arrested, authorities said, as rioters clashed with officers in towns and cities across France, with buildings and vehicles torched and stores looted.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who had increased police deployments fourfold to 40,000 officers on Thursday night in a bid to quell a third night of unrest, said on Twitter that police made 667 arrests.
Nationwide, 249 police were injured in the clashes, authorities said.
President Emmanuel Macron was enrooted to Paris from Brussels after leaving a European Union summit early so he could attend a second cabinet crisis meeting convened in two days.
The government would examine “all options” for restoring order, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said, calling the violence “intolerable and inexcusable” in a tweet.
“The priority is to ensure national unity and the way to do it is to restore order,” she later told reporters during a visit to a Paris suburb.
Violence flared again in Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse and Lille as well as parts of Paris, including the working class suburb of Nanterre, where 17-year-old Nahel M who was of Algerian and Moroccan descent was shot dead on Tuesday.
His death has fuelled longstanding complaints of police violence and systemic racism inside law enforcement agencies from rights groups and within the low-income, racially mixed suburbs around France’s major cities.
Overnight videos on social media showed urban landscapes ablaze across the country. A tram was set alight in the eastern city of Lyon and 12 buses gutted in a depot in Aubervilliers, northern Paris.
The facade of the adjacent Aubervilliers aquatic centre, where training will take place for the Olympics in 2024, was slightly damaged in the fire, SOLIDEO, the company in charge of the Games’ infrastructures, told media.
In Nanterre on the city’s outskirts, protesters torched cars, barricaded streets and hurled projectiles at police following an earlier peaceful vigil held to pay tribute to the dead boy. (Int’l News Desk)
