IA precarious calm returned to Nanterre on Thursday morning. On the way to the Pablo Picasso social housing district, the traces of the previous night are unmistakable. Remains of tear gas cartridges lie on the ground. Street cleaners are clearing away debris and projectiles. “It’s never been this bad,” says one of them, “is this a civil war now?” There is a faint smell of burning in the air. Charred trash cans line the footpath. Burned-out car wrecks lie on the side of the road. Behind it, the Prefecture’s skyscraper looms, a building from the 1970s designed by a student of Le Corbusier.
This is where the protest march called by the mother of 17-year-old Nahel M., who was killed by a police officer, began in the afternoon. “We’re making a revolt for my son. I only had one,” she announced on Tiktok. During the demonstration, she sat on the roof of a car in the midst of hundreds of people who followed her call. Many participants wore shirts that said “Justice for Nahel” and signs with the slogan “The police kill”. The police had feared that there could be riots. And indeed, things did not remain quiet for long.
As the newspaper “Le Parisien” and the broadcaster BFMTV reported, there were clashes between the police and demonstrators after the funeral march, in which around 6,000 people had participated. Task forces were therefore pelted with Molotov cocktails, the police monitored the situation with helicopters and brought together special forces in Nanterre.
The 17-year-old Frenchman Nahel M. drove at 7.45 a.m. on Monday at the wheel of a Mercedes AMG registered in Poland “at excessive speed” on a bus lane through the Paris suburb. This is how the responsible prosecutor Pascal Prache described the course of events at a press conference in Nanterre on Thursday. The two police officers from the motorcycle patrol tried to stop the car for the first time and warned him with lights and horns. “The car took off and ran a red light,” said the prosecutor. The motorcycle patrol then gave chase. The prosecutor described the first results of the evaluation of the city’s video surveillance. There was a danger to life for a pedestrian and a cyclist.
Chase with a deadly end
The chase only ended when the car came to a standstill in a traffic jam shortly after 8:10 a.m. The two patrol officers surrounded the yellow sports car. One of the three occupants fled and is still being sought. When Nahel M. started the engine again, one of the two police officers shot him. The 17-year-old was killed by a single bullet that struck his left arm and then his chest, prosecutors said. The police officers would have provided first aid, but when the ambulance arrived, Nahel M. was already dead.
The statements of the police officers matched the descriptions of the second, underage inmate, who is free again. The prosecutor has opened criminal proceedings for intentional homicide against the 38-year-old police officer who used his firearm. “The prosecutor assumes that the conditions for using the firearm were not met,” said Prache. The police officer, who was decorated for his work during the Yellow Vests protests and previously served as a soldier in Afghanistan, was remanded in custody.
After an emergency meeting with President Emmanuel Macron, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced that 40,000 police officers would be mobilized across the country. The riots had spread like a wildfire on Thursday night. In the banlieues of Toulouse, Lyon, Nice and Roubaix, a violent minority took to the streets “to avenge Nahel”. The epicenter of the riots, however, formed the social housing districts of the satellite towns of the banlieue around Paris. A group of masked men tried to break into the Fresnes detention center, and in another suburb, rioters raced across the street in a stolen bus. Some neighborhoods were completely left to their own devices when violence erupted.
Interior Minister Darmanin lamented the “intolerable violence against the symbols of the republic”. Nothing can justify the violence against city halls, schools and police stations, said President Macron. He thanked police officers, firefighters and political leaders for their efforts. Republican leader Eric Ciotti has called for a state of emergency to be imposed, with night-time curfews in certain neighborhoods like those at the height of the 2005 banlieue riots.
Left spokesman Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI), who received almost 22 percent of the vote in the presidential elections a year ago, described the police officer as a “murderer”. He called for the law, passed in 2017 in the wake of a particularly brutal arson attack on two squad cars, to be scrapped. Mélenchon said it was tantamount to a “license to kill” for the police. In 2022, 13 people were killed in France during police checks for refusing to obey police orders. Criminal proceedings are therefore ongoing against five police officers. Marine Le Pen accused the left-wing party LFI of inciting violence and disorder. The government, on the other hand, is violating the presumption of innocence “for fear of the unrest” and is helping to fuel the riots, said the right-wing populist.
#France #Police #mobilize #officers #protests