PARIS, July 3 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The grandmother of the French teenager whose killing by police sparked riots called for calm on Sunday, as the home of the mayor of a Paris suburb was attacked with a burning car in a new eruption of violence.
The government of President Emmanuel Macron has been battling five nights of violent protests since 17-year-old Nahel M was shot dead in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday by an officer during a traffic check.
The killing of Nahel M, who was of Algerian origin, has revived longstanding accusations of institutional racism within the French police, which rights groups say single out minorities during stops.
Seeking to quell what has become one of the biggest challenges to Macron since he took office in 2017, the interior ministry said it would deploy 45,000 police and gendarmes nationwide overnight Sunday to Monday, the same figure as the previous two nights.
The ministry said 719 people were arrested overnight, around half the figure of the previous night. Intense clashes were nevertheless reported in several places, including the southern city of Marseille.
“Stop and do not riot,” Nahel’s grandmother, Nadia, told BFM television in a telephone interview, saying that the rioters were only using his death as a “pretext”.
“I tell the people who are rioting this: Do not smash windows, attack schools or buses. Stop! It’s the mums who are taking the bus, it’s the mums who walk outside,” she said.
Adding she was “tired”, Nadia said: “Nahel, he is dead. My daughter had only one child, and now she is lost, it’s over, my daughter no longer has a life. And as for me, they made me lose my daughter and my grandson.”
Politicians condemned the attack on the home of Vincent Jeanbrun, the right-wing mayor of L’Hay-les-Roses outside Paris, in which assailants rammed a burning car into his home with the aim of setting it on fire, prosecutors said.
Jeanbrun’s wife and children, aged five and seven, were at home while the mayor himself was at the town hall to deal with the riots. The wife was “badly injured” sustaining a broken leg, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors have opened an attempted murder investigation. “Last night the horror and disgrace reached a new level,” the mayor said in a statement.
“The situation was much calmer” overall, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne told reporters as she visited L’Hay-les-Roses.
“But an act of the kind we saw this morning here is particularly shocking. We will let no violence get by” unpunished, she said, urging that the perpetrators be sanctioned with the “utmost severity”.
Some 7,000 police were deployed in Paris and its suburbs alone, including along the Champs Elysees avenue in the capital, a tourist hotspot, following calls on social media to take the rioting to the heart of the city. — NNN-AGENCIES
