Tue 8 Nov 2005
6:55am (UK) New rioting in Belgium and Germany French Cabinet ministers were meeting on Tuesday to authorise curfews aimed at stopping rioters after the country's worst civil unrest in decades raged for a 12th night. Meanwhile, apparent copycat attacks also spread outside France, with five cars torched outside the main train station in Brussels, Belgium. German police were also investigating the burning of five cars in Berlin. Rioters in the France's southern city of Toulouse ordered passengers off a bus and then set it on fire and pelted police with petrol bombs and rocks. Youths also torched another bus in the north-eastern Paris suburb of Stains, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said he was to meet with his Cabinet to approve curfews "wherever it is necessary" under a state of emergency law. Police reservists will be deployed as reinforcements to help end the rioting that has spread from Paris' suburbs to nearly 300 cities and towns, Villepin said. Outside the capital in Sevran, a junior high school was set ablaze, while in another Paris suburb, Vitry-sur-Seine, youths threw petrol bombs at a hospital, Hamon said. No one was injured. Rioters also attacked a police station with gasoline bombs in Chenove, in Burgundy's Cote D'Or, Hamon said. A nursery school in Lille-Fives, in northern France, was set on fire, regional officials said. However, Hamon said there was a "considerable decrease" in the number of incidents overnight compared to the night before in the Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris. Nationwide, vandals burned 814 cars overnight compared to 1,400 vehicles a night earlier, according to national police figures. A total of 143 people were arrested down from 395 the night before. A 61-year-old man died on Monday of wounds sustained last week in an attack, the first fatality in the violence. © Copyright Press Association Ltd 2005, All Rights Reserved. This article: http://www.scotsman.com/?id=2210672005 |