PARIS: France’s leadership said “all options” were open on Friday, including a state of emergency, to clamp down on three nights of violent and fiery protests over a policeman’s killing of a teenager.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has asked prefects acros the country to halt all public transport with buses and trams shut down from 9pm local time.
The move is part of a bundle of measures to ease tensions after heavy riots erupted throughout the country.
After a night of car torching and shops being ransacked as well as hundreds of arrests, calls grew on Friday from the conservative and far-right opposition to give authorities increased powers.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the government was “looking at all options” when asked about a possible state of emergency, although some ministers are known to oppose the step.
Declaring an emergency would give authorities more powers to enact localised curfews, ban demonstrations, and give police more freedom in restraining suspected rioters and searching homes.
The hardening tone came after police sources said Thursday night was marked by pillaging of shops, reportedly including flagship branches of Nike and Zara in Paris.
Public buildings across the country were also targeted, including police stations, schools and town halls.
President Emmanuel Macron rushed back to France from a Brussels summit to helm a crisis meeting — the second in as many days.
He said that a total of 492 structures were damaged, 2,000 vehicles burned and 3,880 fires started nationwide.
The unrest has come in response to the fatal shooting of 17-year-old identified as “Nahel M”, whose death has revived longstanding grievances about policing and racial profiling in France’s low-income and multi-ethnic suburbs.
Around 40,000 police and gendarmes — along with elite Raid and GIGN units — were deployed in several cities overnight, with curfews issued in municipalities around Paris and bans on public gatherings in Lille and Tourcoing in the country’s north.
Despite the massive security deployment, violence and damage were reported in multiple areas.
The latest interior ministry figures on Friday afternoon showed 875 arrests overnight, while 249 police officers were injured — none of them seriously.
Rioting apparently linked to the police shooting had even followed Macron to the Belgian capital, with Brussels police reporting 63 people detained late Thursday for setting fires and erecting barricades. (Story continues below)
A protester runs through tear gas during clashes that broke out after a commemoration march for a teenage driver shot dead by a policeman, in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre on Thursday. (Photo: AFP)
‘Severely disrupted’
France has been rocked by successive nights of protests since Nahel was shot point-blank on Tuesday during a traffic stop captured on video.
In her first media interview since the shooting, Nahel’s mother, Mounia, told the France 5 channel: “I don’t blame the police, I blame one person: the one who took the life of my son.”
She said the 38-year-old officer responsible, who was detained and charged with voluntary manslaughter on Thursday, “saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life”.
Heightened security appeared to do little to deter unrest on Thursday night.
In the city centre of Marseille, a library was vandalised, according to local officials, and scuffles broke out nearby when police used tear gas to disperse a group of 100 to 150 people who allegedly tried to set up barricades.
In Nanterre, the epicentre of the unrest, tensions rose around midnight, with fireworks and explosives set off in the Pablo Picasso district, where Nahel had lived, according to an AFP journalist.
The Paris region’s bus and tram lines remained “severely disrupted” on Friday, the transport operator RATP said, after a dozen vehicles were torched overnight in a depot and some routes were blocked or damaged.
Services will be closed from 9pm each night until further notice “for the safety of our workers and passengers”, the regional transport authority IDFM said.
The government is desperate to avoid a repeat of 2005 urban riots, sparked by the death of two boys of African origin in a police chase, during which 6,000 people were arrested. (Story continues below)
A municipal employee walks past shattered windows of a theatre in Roubaix in northern France on Friday. (AFP Photo)
‘Bullet in the head’
There have long been concerns over allegations of systemic racism in the French police and the UN rights office said Friday the killing of the teen of North African descent was “a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and racial discrimination in law enforcement.”
Nahel was killed as he pulled away from police who were trying to stop him for a traffic infraction.
A video, authenticated by AFP, showed two police officers standing by the side of the stationary car, with one pointing a weapon at the driver.
A voice is heard saying: “You are going to get a bullet in the head.”
The police officer then appears to fire as the car abruptly drives off.
The officer’s lawyer, Laurent-Franck Lienard, told BFMTV late Thursday that his client had apologised as he was taken into custody.
“The first words he pronounced were to say sorry, and the last words he said were to say sorry to the family,” Lienard said.