France unrest: Third night of riots after police shoot teen, officer charged

Reuters:

NANTERRE, France, June 29- France saw unrest spread to major cities in a third night of riots on Thursday as President Emmanuel Macron fought to contain a mounting crisis triggered by the deadly police shooting of a teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent during a traffic stop.

Forty thousand police officers were deployed across France – nearly four times the numbers mobilised on Wednesday – but there were few signs that government appeals to de-escalate the violence would quell the widespread anger.

In Nanterre, the working-class town on the western outskirts of Paris where 17-year-old Nahel M. was shot dead on Tuesday, protesters torched cars, barricaded streets and hurled projectiles at police following a peaceful vigil.

Protesters scrawled “Vengeance for Nahel” across buildings and as night set a bank was lit on fire before firefighters put it out and an elite police unit deployed an armoured vehicle.

In central Paris, a Nike shoe store was broken into, and 14 people were arrested and 16 more were arrested with stolen objects after store windows were smashed along the rue de Rivoli shopping street, Paris police said.

National police said on Thursday night that officers faced new incidents in Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse and Lille, including fires and fireworks.

Videos on social media showed numerous fires across the country, including at a bus depot in a suburb north of Paris and a tram in the eastern city of Lyon.

In Marseille, France’s second city, police fired tear gas grenades during clashes with youths in the tourist hot-spot of Le Vieux Port, the city’s main paper La Provence reported.

The incident has fed longstanding complaints of police violence and systemic racism inside law enforcement agencies from rights groups and within the low-income, racially mixed suburbs around major cities in France.

The local prosecutor said the officer involved had been put under formal investigation over voluntary homicide and would be held in prison in preventive detention.

Under France’s legal system, being placed under formal investigation is akin to being charged in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions.

“The public prosecutor considers that the legal conditions for using the weapon have not been met,” Pascal Prache, the prosecutor, told a news conference.