French protesters erected barricades, lit fires and shot fireworks at police in the streets of some French cities overnight as tensions mounted over the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old that has shocked the nation.
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 teen, who is only being identified by his first name, Nahel. On the other side of Paris, protesters lit a fire at the city hall of the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The French capital also saw garbage bins set ablaze and some store windows smashed.
In the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, police sought to disperse violent groups in the city centre, regional authorities said.
Tens of thousands of police officers were deployed to quell the protests, which have gripped the country three nights in a row. More than 400 people were arrested overnight around the country and around 200 police officers were injured, according to a national police spokesperson. No information was available about injuries among the rest of the population.
Schools, police stations targeted
Schools, town halls and police stations were targeted by people setting fires, and police used tear gas, water cannons and dispersion grenades against rioters, the spokesperson said.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said 40,000 officers would be deployed overnight Thursday to Friday, with 5,000 in the Paris region alone.
“The professionals of disorder must go home,” Darmanin said. While he said there’s no need yet to declare a state of emergency — a measure taken to quell weeks of rioting that followed the accidental death of two boys fleeing police in 2005 — he added: “The state’s response will be extremely firm.”
The police officer accused of pulling the trigger Tuesday 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.” Preliminary charges mean investigating magistrates strongly suspect wrongdoing but need to investigate more before sending a case to trial.
The detained police officer’s lawyer, speaking on French TV channel BFMTV, said the officer was sorry and “devastated.” The officer did what he thought was necessary in the moment, attorney Laurent-Franck Lienard told the news outlet.
“He doesn’t get up in the morning to kill people,” Lienard said of the officer, whose name has not been released as per French practice in criminal cases. “He really didn’t want to kill.”
Captured on video
The shooting captured on video shocked France and stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
The teenager’s family and their lawyers haven’t said the police shooting was race-related and they didn’t release his surname or details about him.
Still, anti-racism activists renewed their complaints about police behaviour.
“We have to go beyond saying that things need to calm down,” said Dominique Sopo, head of the campaign group SOS Racisme. “The issue here is how do we make it so that we have a police force that when they see Blacks and Arabs, don’t tend to shout at them, use racist terms against them and in some cases, shoot them in the head.”
In Nanterre, a peaceful march Thursday afternoon in honour of Nahel was followed by escalating confrontations, with smoke billowing from cars and garbage bins set ablaze.
Tensions rose in places across France throughout the day.
Curfew in some towns
In the usually tranquil Pyrenees town of Pau in southwestern France, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a new police office, national police said. Vehicles were set on fire in Toulouse and a tramway train was torched in a suburb of Lyon, police said. Paris police said its officers made 40 arrests, some on the margins of the largely peaceful memorial march for the teen and others elsewhere.
Bus and tram services in the Paris area shut down before sunset as a precaution, and many tram lines remained shut for Friday morning rush hour.
The town of Clamart, home to 54,000 people in the French capital’s southwest suburbs, said it was taking the extraordinary step of imposing an overnight curfew through Monday, citing “the risk of new public order disturbances.” The mayor of Neuilly-sur-Marne announced a similar curfew in that town in the eastern suburbs.
The unrest extended as far as Brussels, the Belgian capital city and EU administrative hub, where about a dozen people were detained during scuffles related to the shooting in France. Police spokesperson Ilse Van de Keere said that several fires were brought under control and that at least one car was burned.
Prache, the Nanterre prosecutor, said officers tried to stop Nahel because he looked so young and was driving a Mercedes with Polish licence plates in a bus lane. He allegedly ran a red light to avoid being stopped then got stuck in traffic. Both officers involved said they drew their guns to prevent him from fleeing.
The officer who fired a single shot said he feared he and his colleague or someone else could be hit by the car, according to Prache.
The scenes in France’s suburbs echoed 2005, when the deaths of 15-year-old Bouna Traore and 17-year-old Zyed Benna led to three weeks of riots, exposing anger and resentment in neglected, crime-ridden suburban housing projects. The two boys were electrocuted after hiding from police in a power substation in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.
Deadly use of firearms is less common in France than in the United States, though several people have died or sustained injuries at the hands of French police in recent years, prompting demands for more accountability. France also saw protests against racial profiling and other injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota.
A police spokesperson said 13 people who didn’t comply with traffic stops were fatally shot by police last year. This year, three people, including Nahel, have died in similar circumstances.