Armored police vehicles forced their way through the charred remains of cars that had been overturned and set on fire in Nanterre, the northwestern suburb of the country where a police officer shot the young man, who has only been identified by name, Nahel, during a check. of traffic. A relative of the victim said that his family has Algerian roots.
The riots spread to the Belgian capital, Brussels, where about a dozen people were detained after clashes related to the shooting in France and several fires broke out.
In several neighborhoods in Paris, groups launched firecrackers at security forces. The capital’s 12th arrondissement police station was attacked and some shops were looted on Rivoli street, near the Louvre museum, and in the Forum des Halles, the largest shopping center in the center.
The authorities mobilized around 40,000 agents to quell the protests. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the police detained 667 people, 307 of them in the Paris region, said the capital’s police headquarters.
Some 200 officers were injured, a national police spokesman said. The number of injured civilians was not immediately reported.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin denounced on Friday what he described as a night of “unusual violence.” His office described the arrests as a marked increase from previous operations as part of government efforts to be “extremely tough” against rioters.
The executive has not declared a state of emergency, a measure that was put in place to stem unrest after the accidental death of two boys fleeing from police in 2005. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne suggested on Friday that it was considering that option.
President Emmanuel Macron left a European Union summit in Brussels early and returned to Paris for an emergency security meeting.
The police officer accused of shooting the teenager on Tuesday faces a preliminary charge of voluntary manslaughter after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to the conclusion that “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.”
The incident, which was caught on video, shocked the country and stirred long-standing tensions between police and young people living in social housing complexes and lower-class neighborhoods.
Speaking to French television station BFMTV, the policeman’s lawyer said the officer was sorry and “destroyed.” The police officer did what he believed was necessary at the time, according to his lawyer, Laurent-Franck Lienard.
“He doesn’t get up in the morning to kill people,” Lienard said of his client, whose name was not made public by the country’s rules. “I really didn’t want to kill.”
The prosecutor explained that the agents tried to stop Nahel because he seemed very young and was driving a Mercedes with Polish license plates in the bus lane. Apparently, the young man jumped a red light to avoid the police and got stuck in traffic.
The police officer who fired the shots said he feared he and his partner, or anyone else, would be run over as they fled, Prache added.
Nahel’s mother, who was identified as Mounia M., told France 5 television that she is angry with the officer who killed her only son, but not with the police in general. “She saw a young boy, with an Arab appearance, and wanted to take his life,” she said, adding that justice should be “very firm.”
“A police officer cannot take his gun and shoot our children, take their lives,” he said.
The teenager’s grandmother, who was not identified by name, told Algerian Ennahar TV that the family has roots in Algeria.
Anti-racism activists have renewed their complaints about the behavior of the police.
“We have to go beyond saying that things have to calm down,” said Dominique Sopo, head of the activist group SOS Racisme. yell at them, use racist terms against them and, in some cases, shoot them in the head.
In Geneva, the United Nations human rights office expressed its concern about the murder of the minor and the subsequent violence, and called for an immediate investigation into the allegations about a disproportionate use of force in the operation to stop the riots.
“This is the time for the country to seriously address the deep-rooted issues of racism and racial discrimination in the security forces,” office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told reporters.
Shamdasani further noted that the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern in December about “the frequent use of identity checks, discriminatory stops, the application of fixed criminal fines imposed by police or law enforcement, which, according to them, disproportionately affect members of certain minority groups”.
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Corbet and Leicester reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Jeffrey Schaeffer and Aurelien Morissard in Nanterre; Raf Casert in Brussels; Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon; Frank Jordans in Berlin and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
FUENTE: Associated Press
