One relates to a man struck in the head by a less-lethal “beanbag” munition believed to have been fired by police in eastern France as he drove to a petrol station on Jun 30. He is now in a coma.
A second focuses on the death in the Mediterranean port city Marseille on Saturday of a 27-year-old delivery driver called Mohammed who may have been hit by a police rubber bullet known as a “flash-ball” as he rode his scooter.
His pregnant widow told reporters that he had been filming the riots at the time.
“Even the prosecutor told me he was not with the rioters,” she said, according to the Parisien newspaper.
A march has been called for him at 6pm on Thursday.
“DEADLY SHOWDOWN”
The violence has propelled issues of unequal justice and policing, immigration and integration back to the top of the agenda in France after months of battle over Macron’s detested pension reform.
With the loss of manufacturing industries that once employed suburban populations, “France’s socio-economic dynamics have created a ‘clientele’ for the police, mostly from former colonial populations, locked up with them in a deadly showdown with no way out,” police researcher Fabien Jobard told daily Le Monde.
But after days largely below the radar, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally and Macron’s two-time challenger for the presidency, told broadcaster France 2 that “poverty is not at the origin of these riots”.
Instead, the “problem of immigration” had “created in many people’s minds a kind of secession from French society”, she added.
Meanwhile, the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party has joined calls for “citizen marches” on Saturday against “discriminatory” police tactics and social policies.
The party was heckled for days by Macron’s centrists, conservatives and the far right for failing to condemn rioting as soon as it began.
“None of us called for insurrection or setting fires,” LFI’s de-facto leader Jean-Luc Melenchon told investigative outfit Mediapart Wednesday, adding that “no one is happy when cars are burning”.
Nevertheless, left-wingers should “never distance ourselves from the communities we represent, even when there are contradictions”, he added.
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