PARIS — Rioting raged in cities around France for a fourth night despite massive police deployment, with cars and buildings set ablaze and stores looted, as family and friends prepared Saturday, July 1, 2023, to bury the 17-year-old whose killing by police unleashed the unrest.
The government suggested the violence was beginning to lessen thanks to tougher security measures, but damages remained widespread, from Paris to Marseille and Lyon and French territories overseas, where a 54-year-old died after being hit by a stray bullet in French Guiana. The interior ministry announced 994 arrests around France by early Saturday.
France’s national soccer team — including international star Kylian Mbappe, an idol to many young people in the disadvantaged neighborhoods where the anger is rooted — pleaded for an end to the violence.
“Many of us are from working-class neighborhoods, we too share this feeling of pain and sadness” over the killing of 17-year-old Nahel, the players said in a statement. “Violence resolves nothing. ... There are other peaceful and constructive ways to express yourself.”
They said it’s time for “mourning, dialogue and reconstruction” instead.
The fatal shooting of Nahel, whose last name has not been made public, stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects who struggle with poverty, unemployment and racial discrimination. The subsequent rioting is the worst France has seen in years and puts new pressure on President Emmanuel Macron, who appealed to parents to keep children off the streets and blamed social media for fueling violence.
Family and friends were holding a funeral gathering Saturday for Nahel in his hometown of Nanterre. Anger erupted in the Paris suburb after his death there Tuesday, June 27, and quickly spread nationwide.
Early Saturday, firefighters in Nanterre extinguished blazes set by protesters that left scorched remains of cars strewn across the streets. In the neighboring suburb Colombes, protesters overturned garbage bins and used them for makeshift barricades.
Looters during the evening broke into a gun shop and made off with weapons in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, police said. Officers in Marseille arrested nearly 90 people as groups of protesters lit cars on fire and broke store windows to take what was inside.
Buildings and businesses were also vandalized in the eastern city of Lyon, where a third of the roughly 30 arrests made were for theft, police said. Authorities reported fires in the streets after an unauthorized protest drew more than 1,000 people earlier Friday evening. / AP