IIn several French cities, there were clashes again between the police and demonstrators during the night. Officials were confronted with new incidents in Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse and Lille, the national police said on Thursday evening. “The state’s response must be extremely resolute,” said Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin in the northern town of Mons-en-Baroeul, where several municipal buildings were set on fire. In Marseille, police fired tear gas when clashes broke out with youths, reports La Provence newspaper.
It’s the third night of rioting in a row. Nationwide, 40,000 police officers are on duty, around four times as many as on Wednesday evening. There have been no buses and trams in the Paris region since Thursday evening, and in Clamart, eight kilometers from the center of Paris, there is a night curfew until Monday.
The riots were triggered by the deadly shots of a police officer at a young person of North African descent during a traffic stop in the Parisian working-class suburb of Nanterre. A motorcycle patrol stopped the 17-year-old at the wheel of a car on Tuesday morning. When the young man suddenly drove off, the deadly shot fell from the police officer’s service weapon.
A bank branch was set on fire in Nanterre on Thursday evening, with the flames spreading to a residential building above. The fire brigade extinguished the fire without harming anyone.
Special police units were deployed in Lille, Lyon and Bordeaux. In Grenoble, a bus was shot at with firecrackers and the workers of the transport company stopped work.
Following a funeral march for the youth who was shot in Nanterre, there were already clashes between protesters and the police there on Thursday evening. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the officers, the police monitored the situation with helicopters and called in special forces, and 19 people were arrested. In the port city of Marseille, hundreds of protesters clashed with the police, shops were looted and 14 people arrested.
A formal investigation into manslaughter was initiated against the officer on Thursday, and he was taken into custody. The use of the weapon in the control was not justified, the prosecutor said.
Riots also in Belgium
Clashes between young people and law enforcement officers also broke out in the Belgian capital of Brussels on Thursday. According to the Belgian news agency Belga, around 30 people were arrested, most of them minors. Young people had played a cat-and-mouse game with the law enforcement officers and there had been several fires, the police said. As the Brussels transport company announced on Twitter, part of the local public transport was discontinued.
Belgian media showed images of a burning car and police officers in riot gear. According to the police, young people called on social networks on Thursday to gather in response to the 17-year-old’s death in France. According to Belga, there were tensions especially around the centrally located district of Anneessens.
Mother calls for the funeral march
A funeral march took place in Nanterre on Thursday in honor of the 17-year-old who was killed. His mother, who called for the march, was on a van accompanying the protest and wore a T-shirt that read “Justice for Nahel.” According to the police, around 6,200 people took part. They held a minute’s silence. However, this was followed by riots, fires and the use of tear gas by the police.
In her first media interview since her son’s death, Mounia’s mother said she assumed the crime was racially motivated, but did not blame the police as a whole. “I don’t blame the police, I blame someone,” she said on France 5. She has friends who are police officers and they “don’t like what he did.”
The policeman “saw the face of an Arab, a little boy, and wanted to take his life,” she said. She hopes that the judiciary will be “really strict”.
Police officer apologizes to family
According to his lawyer Laurent-Franck Liénard, the police officer in police custody apologized to the family. “The first words the officer said were to apologize and the last words he said was to apologize to the family,” the lawyer told BVMTV. His client saw the video for the first time in custody and was “extremely shocked by the violence of this video”.
“He’s devastated. He doesn’t get up in the morning to kill people. He didn’t want to kill,” added the lawyer, announcing that he would appeal the pre-trial detention on Friday.
