French Government Hold Emergency Meeting After Nationwide Riots – News18

French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday attended an emergency meeting after riots erupted for the fifth night in a row across the country following the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed during a traffic stop by a French police officer.

Other attendees included Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, and Justice Minister Éric Dupont-Moretti.

Seeking to quell what has become one of the biggest challenges to Macron since he took office in 2017, the interior ministry said it will overnight Sunday to Monday deploy 45,000 police and gendarmes nationwide, the same figure as the previous two nights.

The French government said 719 people were arrested overnight, around half the figure of the previous night but with intense clashes still reported in several places, including the southern city of Marseille, but calmer elsewhere.

“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.

In Marseille, which has seen intense clashes and looting, police dispersed groups of youths Saturday evening at Canebiere, the main avenue running through the centre of the city, AFP journalists said.

Paris police chief Laurent Nunez cautioned on BFM television that despite the calmer evening “no one is declaring victory”.

The protests present a fresh crisis for Macron, who had been hoping to press on with the pledges of his second term after seeing off months of protests that erupted in January over raising the retirement age.

In a bid to limit the violence, buses and trams in France have stopped running after 9:00 pm (1900 GMT) and the sale of large fireworks banned. Marseille has stopped all urban transport from 6:00 pm.

Macron has urged parents to take responsibility for underage rioters, one-third of whom were “young or very young” and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has said the average age of those arrested was just 17.

A 38-year-old policeman has been charged with voluntary homicide over Nahel’s death and has been remanded in custody.

(With AFP inputs)