France arrests 600 people in latest clashes over teen’s killing
FIREFIGHTERS EXTINGUISH burning cars, during a commemoration march for a teenage driver shot dead by a policeman, in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, on June 29, 2023. Violent protests broke out in France in the early hours of June 29, 2023, as anger grows over the police killing of a teenager, with security forces arresting 150 people in the chaos that saw balaclava-clad protesters burning cars and setting off fireworks. Nahel M., 17, was shot in the chest at point-blank range in Nanterre in the morning of June 27, 2023. (Raphael Lafargue/Abaca via Zuma Press/TNS)
More than 600 people were arrested in France in the third straight night of street violence over the police killing of a teenager in a Paris suburb.
The majority of those arrested overnight Thursday were between 14 and 18 years old, Agence France-Presse reported.
Protesters targeted municipal buildings, such as town halls and libraries in Marseille and in the Seine-Saint-Denis department north of Paris. A hotel caught fire in Roubaix in northern France and some stores were vandalized, including in central Paris, according to AFP.
President Emmanuel Macron is set to hold another crisis meeting Friday afternoon, AFP reported, citing his office.
Anger erupted across the country after Nahel, 17, was fatally shot at close range in his car Tuesday in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris. Video posted on social media showed two police officers leaning into the car, with one of them shooting as the driver pulls away. Authorities haven’t released Nahel’s last name.
The officer who fired the shot was charged with murder and is being held in pre-trial detention. Pascal Prache, the Nanterre prosecutor, said on Thursday that his office determined that the legal conditions for the use of a weapon were “not met.”
Nahel’s mother, identified only as Mounia, said in an interview with France 5 that she did not blame the police. “I blame one person, the one who took my son’s life,” she said.
Earlier on Thursday afternoon, 6,000 people attended a march in Nanterre in Nahel’s memory.
Authorities significantly scaled up the number of security forces ahead of Thursday night’s protests, mobilizing 40,000 officers throughout the country, including 5,000 in Paris. Bus and tramway services were suspended from 9 p.m. in the greater Paris area.
Macron condemned the violent acts in a tweet on Thursday, calling them “unjustifiable.”
The unrest has echoes of riots that broke out for weeks in 2005 after two boys died in an electricity substation following a police chase, and has thrown a spotlight on French policing and longsimmering tensions in the country’s poorer suburbs.