Paris.- At least 1,311 people were arrested in France and 79 police officers were injured in the fourth consecutive night of riots over the death of a young man at the hands of the police on Tuesday when he tried to flee from a roadblock, although they were minor intensity.
The figures were reported by the French Interior Ministry, which in an updated count issued around noon indicated that 752 arrests were made by the national police, 153 by the gendarmerie and 406 by the Paris Police Prefecture, according to public radio FranceInfo.
Despite the large number of arrests, higher than that of the previous days, the French authorities assess that the incidents were less intense than the previous night.
“Thanks to the mobilization of internal security forces throughout the country, the level of violence committed was less intense than the night before,” said the portfolio on the social network Twitter when communicating the first data this morning, at 8:00 p.m. hours (6 hours GMT).
Among the injured police and gendarmes are four officers injured in incidents with firearms in Vaulx-en-Velin (on the outskirts of Lyon), two with bruises and another two hit by shrapnel.
Added to these figures is a total of some 1,350 vehicles set on fire and damage to some 234 buildings, also according to sources from the Ministry of the Interior cited by the local press, which is around half of those registered the previous night.
The night was calmer in the Paris region, although serious incidents did not stop in peripheral areas such as Seine-Saint-Denis or Nanterre, where the death of the young Nahel M. took place on the 27th.
In places like Marseille, where the Government had to send reinforcements at night at the request of the City Council, Grenoble or Lyon were more worrying, with scenes of looting included.
For this night from Friday to Saturday, the Government had put 45,000 police officers on the streets with a reinforced device that included the deployment of light armored vehicles from the Gendarmerie.
The previous night the number of arrests rose to 875 and there were almost 300 policemen injured, although none seriously.
Nahel, a 17-year-old young man of Arab descent, was fatally shot by a policeman on the 27th when he tried to flee from a police checkpoint in Nanterre.
The images of the events, recorded by witnesses, sparked strong indignation in the country, which degenerated into riots, especially in the popular neighborhoods of large cities and in the metropolitan area of Paris.
The young man will be buried today, as Patrick Jarry, the mayor of Nanterre, had detailed the day before, although in a statement to the French press the family has indicated that they want it to be a day of “discretion” and “recollection” and has asked that No journalists come.
