After a third night of protests following a police officer’s teen killing, French President Emmanuel Macron has hurried home from an EU summit for a crisis meeting.
Following a second night of unrest and demonstrations across several French cities, Macron called his cabinet together for a second crisis meeting on Friday.
Angered by police brutality and racism, minorities in French society erupted into unrest and clashes after Nahel M, a 17-year-old boy of North African descent, was killed by police at a traffic stop in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, on Tuesday.
The widespread unrest creates a dangerous situation that is escalating after exposing society’s long-hidden racial wounds.
The unrest was started by the unjustly killed teenage boy, whose mother claimed on Thursday that her son’s death was racially motivated.
She claimed that racism caused the 38-year-old police officer who killed her son and has since been charged with voluntary homicide to forego using other methods of controlling her son, who was driving the car, because he “saw an Arab face.”
read more: France’s President Emmanuel Macron has scheduled a second crisis meeting
He wasn’t required to murder my son. “A bullet? So close to his chest? No, no,” the unmarried mother, who was reportedly employed in the medical field, exclaimed while breaking down in tears.
The officer “saw an Arab face, a little kid,” and wanted to kill him, she claimed.
She cried, “How long is this going to go on for? How many more kids are going to be like this? How many mothers will find themselves in this situation as I am?
To put an end to unrest for a third night, the Interior Ministry sent out 40,000 police officers on Thursday night.
Along with portions of Paris, violence broke out in Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse, and Lille.
Gerald Darmanin, the interior minister, announced on Twitter that at least 667 people had been detained across France over the course of the previous night as protesters and police fought.
Public transportation in the Paris region will be severely disrupted on Friday, according to Transport Minister Clement Beaune, who also did not rule out an early network closure, on RMC radio. Overnight, 12 buses in a depot in Aubervilliers, in the north of Paris, were set on fire and completely destroyed.
Following an earlier peaceful vigil organized by Mounia to remember the dead boy, protesters torched cars, blocked streets, and threw projectiles at police in Nanterre, the victim’s neighborhood on the western outskirts of Paris.
Police used tear gas in the south as youths fought with the police, and Marseille’s Le Vieux Port, a popular tourist destination, was evacuated.
The TESSI company’s office was completely destroyed by fire in Roubaix, northern France, along with a number of other vehicles.
The unrest has brought back memories of the riots that shook France for three weeks in 2005, forcing then-President Jacques Chirac to issue a state of emergency.
