French President Emmanuel Macron was Friday to chair a new crisis meeting of ministers after a third straight night of nationwide protests over the deadly police shooting of a teenager saw cars torched, shops ransacked and hundreds arrested.
The overnight unrest followed a march on Thursday in memory of the 17-year-old, named Nahel, whose death has revived longstanding grievances about policing and racial profiling in France’s low-income and multiethnic suburbs.
The Élysée announced Macron would cut short a trip to Brussels, where he was attending a European Union summit, to chair a crisis meeting on the violence – the second such emergency talks in as many days.
Around 40,000 police and gendarmes – along with elite Raid and GIGN units – were deployed in several cities overnight, with curfews issued in municipalities around Paris and bans on public gatherings instated in Lille and Tourcoing in the country’s north.
Despite the massive security deployment, violence and damage were reported in multiple areas.
The interior ministry said 875 people had been arrested in what Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin described as a night of “rare violence”. Some 249 police officers were injured, none of them seriously, the ministry announced.
Police sources said that rather than pitched battles between protesters and police, the night was marked by pillaging of shops, reportedly including flagship branches of Nike and Zara in Paris.
Public buildings were also targeted, with a police station in the Pyrenees city of Pau hit with a Molotov cocktail, according to regional…
