Despite increasing the police presence in the country to 45,000 policemen and gendarmes onto the streets – equipped for the first time with 18 armored vehicles – the unrest situation in France remains out of control in the first night since the videotaped death teenager Nahel, and as much as 100 cities were touched by riots on Friday night.
Nahel was shot after trying to flee a traffic stop, and died after emergency services attended the scene. His death ignited a revolt among the poor, racially mixed, urban communities.
Reuters Reported:
“The violence, in which buildings and vehicles have been torched and stores looted, has plunged President Emmanuel Macron into the gravest crisis of his leadership since the Yellow Vest protests that started in 2018.
[…]He asked local authorities to halt bus and tram traffic from 9 p.m. (1900 GMT) across France and later said 45,000 officers from the police forces would be deployed on Friday evening, 5,000 more than on Thursday.”
Macron left a European Union summit in Brussels early to attend a cabinet crisis, while protesters torched cars, barricaded streets and hurled projectiles at police following an earlier peaceful vigil.
“The policeman whom prosecutors say acknowledged firing a lethal shot at the teenager is in preventive custody under formal investigation for voluntary homicide – equivalent to being charged under Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions.
His lawyer, Laurent-Franck Lienard, said his client had aimed down at the driver’s leg but was bumped when the car took off, causing him to shoot towards his chest. ‘Obviously (the officer) didn’t want to kill the driver’, Lienard said on BFM TV.”
What started as a primarily immigrant-drive protest now has started to see more involvement from White leftists, much more present than in previous nights.
After initially criticizing the police in a move that was widely criticized, President Emmanuel Macron has now accused protesters of exploiting the death of Nahel.
BBC reported:
“At a crisis meeting, France’s president said more officers would be deployed to contain the violence, but stopped short of declaring a state of emergency.
He urged parents to keep rioting children at home and social media platforms to remove certain content.”
“Mr Macron said that about a third of those arrested for rioting were ‘young, or very young’, with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin later clarifying that some were as young as 13. […] Imploring parents to take action, he said it was their ‘responsibility’ to keep any child intending to protest ‘at home’.”
In France’s second largest city, Marseille, rioters looted a gun store on Friday night and stole some hunting rifles, and a new video posted by the gunmen using […] Kalashnikov rifles in #Oyonnax in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.
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