After nationwide protests in France over the fatal shooting of a teenager resulted in violence, arson, and numerous arrests, French President Emmanuel Macron convened a crisis meeting. The French Prime Minister stated that the government considered “all options” to restore order, including the declaration of a state of emergency.
France’s president rushed home from an EU summit Friday for a crisis meeting after a third night of protests over a policeman’s killing of a teen saw cars torched, shops ransacked, and hundreds arrested.
Police sources said that rather than pitched battles between protesters and police, the night was marked by the pillaging of shops, reportedly including flagship branches of Nike and Zara in Paris.
Public buildings were also targeted, with a police station in the Pyrenees city of Pau hit with a Molotov cocktail, according to regional authorities, and an elementary school and a district office set on fire in the northern town of Lille.
The unrest has come in response to the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Nahel, whose death has revived longstanding grievances about policing and racial profiling in France’s low-income and multi-ethnic suburbs.
Before the meeting, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the government was considering “all options” to restore order, including declaring a state of emergency.
Around 40,000 police and gendarmes, along with elite Raid and GIGN units, were deployed in several cities overnight, with curfews issued in municipalities around Paris and bans on public gatherings in Lille and Tourcoing in the country’s north.
Despite the massive security deployment, violence and damage were reported in multiple areas.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said 667 people had been arrested in what he described as a night of violence, while 249 police officers were injured, none of them seriously.
Rioting apparently linked to the Paris police shooting had even followed Macron to the Belgian capital, with Brussels police reporting 63 people detained late Thursday for setting fires and erecting barricades.
France has been rocked by successive nights of protests since Nahel was shot point-blank on Tuesday during a traffic stop captured on video.
In her first media interview since the shooting, Nahel’s mother, Mounia, told the France 5 channel: “I don’t blame the police, I blame one person: the one who took the life of my son.”
She said the 38-year-old officer responsible, who was detained and charged with voluntary manslaughter on Thursday, “saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life”.
The memorial march for Nahel, led by Mounia, ended with riot police firing tear gas as several cars were set alight in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the teenager lived and was killed.
Heightened security appeared to do little to deter unrest Thursday night.
In Nanterre, the epicenter of the unrest, tensions rose around midnight, with fireworks and explosives set off in the Pablo Picasso district, where Nahel had lived.
Nahel was killed as he pulled away from police trying to stop him for a traffic infraction.
A video showed two police officers standing by the side of the stationary car, with one pointing a weapon at the driver.
A voice is heard saying: “You are going to get a bullet in the head.”
The police officer then appears to fire as the car abruptly drives off.
Clashes erupted as the video emerged, contradicting police accounts that the teenager was driving at the officer.
The officer’s lawyer, Laurent-Franck Lienard, told BFMTV late Thursday that his client had apologized as he was taken into custody.
Miroslava Salazar with AFP
