By Benoit Van Overstraeten
Paris: A French police officer who shot and killed a 17-year-old driver will be investigated for voluntary homicide following two days of fires and violent protests that injured scores of officers, officials said.
France will deploy 40,000 police officers across the country to quell violence that engulfed cities and towns in the wake of the shooting earlier in the week.
Police forces walk past burning cars in Nanterre, outside Paris.Credit: AP
“The state must be firm in its response, tonight 40,000 policemen will be mobilised, including 5000 in the Paris region, versus 9000 yesterday,” French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Thursday (France time).
The epicentre of the unrest was in Nanterre, a working-class town on the western outskirts of Paris, where the shooting of the 17-year-old boy of North African descent identified as Nahel took place. The incident occurred during a traffic stop on Tuesday.
The announcement follows a crisis meeting convened by President Emmanuel Macron who called the violence: “totally unjustifiable”.
Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said that he had requested that the officer be held in custody. That decision is to be made by another magistrate.
Youths clash with police in Nanterre.Credit: AP
Based on an initial investigation, Prache said, he concluded that “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.”
Three persons were in the car when police tried to stop it Tuesday, the prosecutor said. Nahel managed to avoid a traffic stop by running a red light. He was later got stuck in a traffic jam.
Both officers involved said they drew their guns to prevent him from starting the car again.
The officer who fired a single shot said he wanted to prevent the car from leaving and because he feared someone may be hit by the car, including himself or his colleague, according to Prache.
Both officers said they felt “threatened” by seeing the car drive off, he added.
Police made 150 arrests nationwide during a second night of unrest, Darmanin said, as public anger spilled out onto the streets, notably in the ethnically diverse suburbs of France’s big cities.
The fatal shooting has fed into longstanding complaints of police violence from within the low-income, racially mixed suburbs that ring major cities in France.
A video shared on social media, verified by Reuters, shows two police officers beside a car, a Mercedes AMG, with one shooting at the teenage driver at close range as he pulls away. He died shortly afterwards from his wounds, the local prosecutor said.
The interior ministry had said Wednesday on that 2000 police had been mobilised in the Paris region. Shortly before midnight on Nanterre’s Avenue Pablo Picasso, a trail of overturned vehicles burned as fireworks fizzed at police lines.
Police also clashed with protesters in the northern city of Lille and in Toulouse in the southwest, and there was unrest in Amiens, Dijon as well as in numerous districts throughout the greater Paris region, the authorities said.
Darmanin said 170 officers had been injured in the unrest but none of the injuries were life-threatening.
“The professionals of disorder must go home,” he said. “There will be a lot more police and gendarmes present [on Thursday night].”
Rights groups allege systemic racism inside law enforcement agencies in France, a charge Macron has previously denied.
Reuters, AP
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