Some 45,000 police officers and a number of armoured vehicles have been deployed as riots rock French cities for a fourth night over a teenager’s fatal shooting.
Buildings and vehicles have been torched and stores looted, and the violence has plunged President Emmanuel Macron into the gravest crisis of his leadership since the Yellow Vest protests in 2018.
Unrest has flared nationwide, including in cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Lille as well as Paris, where Nahel M, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was shot on Tuesday in the Nanterre suburb.
His death, caught on video, has reignited longstanding complaints by poor and racially mixed urban communities of police violence and racism.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said early on Saturday that 270 people had been arrested on Friday night, bringing the total detained to more than 1100 since unrest ignited.
Friday night’s arrests included 80 people in the southern city of Marseille, France’s second-largest.
Social media images showed an explosion rocking Marseille’s old port area. City authorities said they were investigating the cause but did not believe there were any casualties.
Rioters in central Marseille looted a gun store and stole some hunting rifles but no ammunition, police said. One individual was arrested with a rifle likely from the store.
Marseille Mayor Benoit Payan called on the national government to immediately send additional troops. “The scenes of pillaging and violence are unacceptable,” he said in a tweet late on Friday.
In Lyon, France’s third-largest city, the gendarmes police force deployed armoured personnel carriers and a helicopter to quell the unrest.
Darmanin asked local authorities across France to halt bus and tram traffic from 9pm local time and said 45,000 officers were being deployed, 5000 more than on Thursday.
“The next hours will be decisive and I know I can count on your flawless efforts,” he wrote to firefighters and police officers.
Asked on TF1’s main evening television news program whether the government could declare a state of emergency, Darmanin said: “Quite simply, we’re not ruling out any hypothesis and we’ll see after tonight what the president of the republic chooses.”
In Paris, police cleared protesters from the iconic central Place de la Concorde square on Friday night after an impromptu demonstration.
Players from the national French soccer team issued a rare statement calling for calm. “Violence must stop to leave way for mourning, dialogue and reconstruction,” they said, in a statement posted on star Kylian Mbappe’s Instagram account.
Events including two concerts at the Stade de France on the outskirts of the capital were cancelled.
Tour de France organisers said they were ready to adapt to any situation when the bicycle race enters the country on Monday after starting in the Spanish city of Bilbao.
Macron left a European Union summit in Brussels early to attend a second cabinet crisis meeting in two days.
He has asked social media to remove “the most sensitive” footage of rioting and to disclose identities of users fomenting violence.
Darmanin met representatives from Meta, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok. Snapchat said it had zero tolerance for content that promoted violence.
A friend of the victim’s family, Mohamed Jakoubi, who watched Nahel grow up, said the rage was fuelled by a sense of injustice after incidents of police violence against minority ethnic communities, many from former French colonies.
“We are fed up, we are French too. We are against violence, we are not scum,” he said.
The policeman whom prosecutors say acknowledged firing a lethal shot at the teenager is in preventive custody under formal investigation for voluntary homicide – equivalent to being charged.
His lawyer, Laurent-Franck Lienard, said his client had aimed at the driver’s leg but was bumped when the car took off, causing him to shoot towards his chest. “Obviously (the officer) didn’t want to kill the driver,” Lienard said on BFM TV.
By Tassilo Hummel and Mimosa Spencer in PARIS
