Rioting raged in cities around France for a fourth night despite a huge police deployment and 1,311 arrests, with cars and buildings set ablaze and stores looted, as family and friends prepared Saturday to bury the 17-year-old whose killing by police unleashed the unrest.
France’s Interior Ministry announced the new figure for arrests around the country, where 45,000 police officers fanned out in a so-far unsuccessful bid to quell violence.
Despite an appeal to parents by President Emmanuel Macron to keep their children at home, street clashes between young protesters and police raged on. About 2,500 fires were set and stores were ransacked, according to authorities.
The funeral ceremony for the teen, identified only as Nahel, who was killed by police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday, began on Saturday. Family and friends were viewing the open coffin before it will be taken to a mosque for a ceremony and later burial in a town cemetery.
As the number of arrests continued to mount, the government suggested the violence was beginning to lessen thanks to tougher security measures.
Still, the damage was widespread, from Paris to Marseille and Lyon and even far away, in the French territories overseas, where a 54-year-old died after being hit by a stray bullet in French Guiana.
France’s national soccer team — including international star Kylian Mbappe, an idol to many young people in the disadvantaged neighborhoods where the anger is rooted — pleaded for an end to the violence.
“Many of us are from working-class neighborhoods, we too share this feeling of pain and sadness” over the killing of 17-year-old Nahel, the players said in a statement. “Violence resolves nothing. … There are other peaceful and constructive ways to express yourself.”
They said it’s time for “mourning, dialogue and reconstruction” instead.
The slaying of Nahel stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects who struggle with poverty, unemployment and racial discrimination. The subsequent rioting is the worst France has seen in years and puts new pressure on Macron, who blamed social media for fueling violence.
Anger erupted in the Paris suburb after Nahel’s death there Tuesday and quickly spread nationwide.
Early Saturday, firefighters in Nanterre extinguished blazes set by protesters that left scorched remains of cars strewn across the streets. In the neighboring suburb Colombes, protesters overturned garbage bins and used them for makeshift barricades.
Looters during the evening broke into a gun shop and made off with weapons in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, police said. Officers in Marseille arrested nearly 90 people as groups of protesters lit cars on fire and broke store windows to take what was inside.
Buildings and businesses were also vandalized in the eastern city of Lyon, where a third of the roughly 30 arrests made were for theft, police said. Authorities reported fires in the streets after an unauthorized protest drew more than 1,000 people earlier Friday evening.
Source: The Times of Israel
