PARIS: France was reeling on Saturday (Jul 1) from a fourth night of rioting as the family of Nahel M, whose shooting by a police officer sparked the unrest, prepared for the teenager’s funeral.
The government deployed 45,000 police and several armoured vehicles overnight to tackle the worst crisis of President Emmanuel Macron’s leadership since the Yellow Vest protests.
France’s interior ministry said that 994 people had been arrested, compared with 875 the previous night, in violence which it said on Twitter was “lower in intensity”.
Nahel, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was shot during a traffic stop on Tuesday in the French capital’s Nanterre suburb. A private funeral was due to be held later on Saturday, sources told Reuters.
Roads leading to the funeral parlour and the cemetery would be shut off, a Reuters witness said.
Nahel’s death, caught on video, has reignited longstanding complaints by poor and racially mixed urban communities of police violence and racism. Macron had denied there is systemic racism inside French law enforcement agencies.
Buildings and vehicles have been torched and stores looted in the unrest, which has spread nationwide, including to cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Lille.
More than 200 police officers have been injured and hundreds of rioters and have been arrested, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said, adding that their average age was 17.
Friday night’s arrests included 80 people in Marseille, which is home to many people of North African descent.
Social media images showed an explosion rocking the old port area of the southern city, but authorities said they did not believe there were any casualties.
Rioters in the centre of France’s second-largest city looted a gun store and stole hunting rifles but no ammunition, police said. One person was arrested with a rifle likely from the store, police said.
Police were deployed to guard the store.
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