Fiery protests grip France for third night over deadly police shooting of teen

Armoured police vehicles rammed through the charred remains of cars that had been flipped and set ablaze in the northwestern Paris suburb of Nanterre, where a police officer shot the teenage delivery driver, who is only being identified by his first name, Nahel.

On the other side of Paris, protesters lit a fire at the city hall of the suburb of Clichy-Sous-Bois.

In the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, police sought to disperse violent groups in the city centre, regional authorities said.

Tens of thousands of police officers have been deployed to quell the protests, which have gripped the country three nights in a row.

On Thursday, 100 people had been arrested by midnight, according to a national police spokesperson. The number was expected to rise as arrests underway were being tallied.

The police officer accused of pulling the trigger on Tuesday was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met”.

The detained police officer’s lawyer, speaking on French TV channel BFMTV, said the officer was sorry and “devastated”.

The officer did what he thought was necessary in the moment, attorney Laurent-Franck Lienard told the news outlet.

“He doesn’t get up in the morning to kill people,” Mr Lienard said of the officer, whose name has not been released.

“He really didn’t want to kill. But now he must defend himself, as he’s the one who’s detained and sleeping in prison.”

Tensions started to rise in Nanterre following a peaceful march on Thursday afternoon in honour of Nahel, with smoke billowing from cars and garbage bins set ablaze despite government appeals for calm and vows that order would be restored.

Interior minister Gerald Darmanin said the number of officers in the streets would reach 40,000, with 5,000 deployed in the Paris region alone.

“The professionals of disorder must go home,” Mr Darmanin said.

While there’s no need yet to declare a state of emergency — a measure taken to quell weeks of rioting in 2005 — he added: “The state’s response will be extremely firm.”

Tensions had started to rise throughout Thursday.

In the usually tranquil Pyrenees town of Pau in southwestern France, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a new police office, national police said.

Vehicles were set on fire in Toulouse and a tramway train was torched in a suburb of Lyon, police said.

Paris police said its officers made 40 arrests, some on the margins of the largely peaceful memorial march for the teen and others elsewhere.

Bus and tram services in the Paris area shut down before sunset as a precaution to safeguard transportation workers and passengers.

The town of Clamart, home to 54,000 people in the French capital’s southwest suburbs, said it was taking the extraordinary step of imposing an overnight curfew through Monday, citing “the risk of new public order disturbances”.

The mayor of Neuilly-sur-Marne announced a similar curfew in that town in the eastern suburbs.

The unrest extended even to Brussels, the EU administrative home and Belgian capital city, where about a dozen people were detained during scuffles related to the shooting in France.

Police spokeswoman Ilse Van de Keere said that several fires were brought under control and that at least one car was burned.

The shooting captured on video shocked France and stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

The teenager’s family and their lawyers have not said the police shooting was race-related and they did not release his surname or details about him.

Still, anti-racism activists renewed their complaints about police behaviour.

“We have to go beyond saying that things need to calm down,” said Dominique Sopo, head of the campaign group SOS Racisme.

“The issue here is how do we make it so that we have a police force that when they see blacks and Arabs, don’t tend to shout at them, use racist terms against them and in some cases, shoot them in the head.”

Mr Prache, the Nanterre prosecutor, said officers tried to stop Nahel because he looked so young and was driving a Mercedes with Polish license plates in a bus lane.

He allegedly ran a red light to avoid being stopped then got stuck in traffic. Both officers involved said they drew their guns to prevent him from fleeing.

The officer who fired a single shot said he feared he and his colleague or someone else could be hit by the car, according to Mr Prache.

The officers said they felt “threatened” as the car drove off.

He said two magistrates are leading the investigation, as is common in France. Preliminary charges mean investigating judges strongly suspect wrongdoing but need to investigate more before sending the case to trial.

French President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency security meeting on Thursday about the violence.

“These acts are totally unjustifiable,” Mr Macron said at the beginning of the meeting, which aimed at securing hot spots and planning for the coming days “so full peace can return”.