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0 The home of a Paris suburb mayor was rammed by a vehicle and set alight while his wife and children were asleep inside during the unrest that has gripped the country following Tuesday’s fatal shooting of a teenager by a police officer, the official said on Sunday.
Vincent Jeanbrun, mayor of the southern suburb of L’Hay-les-Roses, said his wife and one of their two children, aged five and seven, were injured as they fled the building in the early hours.
Jeanbrun, from the conservative Les Republicains party, was not at home during the incident but at the town hall monitoring the violence. The town hall has been the target of attacks for several nights since the shooting and has been protected with barbed wire and barricades.
“At 1:30 a.m., as I was in the town hall just like the two previous nights, people ram-raided my home before starting a fire to torch my house, where my wife and my two young children were sleeping,” Jeanbrun said on his Twitter account.
“While attempting to shield them and fleeing the attackers, my wife and one of my children got hurt.”
Jeanbrun said the attack represented a new stage of “horror and ignominy” in the unrest and urged the government to impose a state of emergency.
The local prosecutor told reporters that an investigation into attempted murder had been opened. No suspects have been arrested.
The prosecutor said the woman was injured as she fled through the backyard of the house.
As night fell Saturday over the French capital, a small crowd gathered on the Champs-Élysées to protest police violence and the shooting death of the teen known publicly by his first name, Nahel, but they were met by hundreds of officers with batons and shields guarding the avenue and its boutiques.
In a less chic neighbourhood of northern Paris, protesters set off firecrackers and lit barricades on fire as police shot back with tear gas and stun grenades.
Skirmishes erupted in the Mediterranean city of Marseille but appeared less intense than the night before, according to the Interior Ministry. A bolstered police contingent arrested 55 people there.
Thousands of officers have been deployed across France to try and quell another night of violent protests that followed the fatal shooting of a teenager by police.
Nationwide, arrests were lower than the night before. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin attributed that to “the resolute action of security forces.” Police made 719 arrests nationwide by early Sunday.
Darmanin said the latest overnight riots had been less intense, after 45,000 police were deployed following Saturday’s funeral of Nahel in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Since he was shot on Tuesday, rioters have torched cars and looted stores, but they’ve also targeted state institutions — town halls and police stations.
Grandmother urges end to riots
On Sunday, the grandmother of the boy killed during a traffic stop in Nanterre said she wanted the nationwide rioting to end.
Identified as Nadia by French media, she said the rioters were using 17-year-old Nahel’s death as an excuse to cause havoc and that the family wanted calm.
“Nahel is dead. My daughter is lost … she doesn’t have a life anymore,” Nadia told BFM TV. “Don’t destroy the schools, don’t destroy the buses…. I’m telling them [the rioters] to stop.”
More than 3,000 people have been detained overall since Nahel’s death. The mass police deployment has been welcomed by some frightened residents of targeted neighbourhoods and shop owners whose stores have been ransacked — but it has further frustrated those who see police behaviour as the core of France’s current crisis.
