PARIS, Nov 26: Rampaging youths assaulted a police station, set fire to cars and vandalised stores and a McDonald’s restaurant in clashes in a rundown Paris suburb. Twenty-one police officers were injured.
The violence on Sunday night, prompted when two teens were killed in a motorcycle crash with a police patrol car, was a reminder that tensions which drove nationwide riots in 2005 in predominantly immigrant housing projects remain unresolved.
Questions swirled on Monday around the circumstances of the crash in Villiers-le-Bel, a town of public housing blocks home to a mix of Arab, black and white residents in the French capital’s northern suburbs.
Residents said the officers involved in the accident left soon afterward, leaving behind the stricken teens.
The internal police oversight agency opened an inquiry into possible manslaughter and non-assistance to people in danger, a police official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie was heading to the site of the violence on Monday afternoon.
Tension was palpable on Monday as sanitation workers swept glass from broken windows and other debris off the streets of Villiers-le-Bel, and many predicted more violence after nightfall. The mayor called for calm.
In Sunday’s violence, eight people were arrested and 21 police officers were injured -- including the town’s police chief, beaten in the face after he tried to negotiate with the rioters, a police official said.
Residents drew parallels with the 2005 riots, which were prompted by the deaths of two teens electrocuted in a power substation while hiding from police in a suburb northeast of Paris.
The backlash then against police spread across the nation and raged for three weeks, as youths — many of them black or of Arab origin — torched cars and clashed with police in an explosion of anger over discrimination, unemployment and alienation from mainstream French society.
Those riots called the government’s attention to problems that had been festering for decades. Yet a recent study by the state auditor’s office indicated that the money spent in recent decades has done little to solve those problems.
The mayor of Villiers-le-Bel called for calm on Monday, though police officers appeared to be bracing for more possible violence after nightfall.—AP
PARIS, Nov 26: Rampaging youths assaulted a police station, set fire to cars and vandalised stores and a McDonald’s restaurant in clashes in a rundown Paris suburb. Twenty-one police officers were injured.
