No fewer than 667 people have been arrested in what could be described as a night of “rare violence” by French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, while 249 Police officers were injured, none of them seriously.
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 Elysee announced President Emmanuel 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.
Police sources said that rather than pitched battles between protesters and police, the night was marked by the 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 authorities, and an elementary school and a district office set on fire in Lille.
READ ALSO: Cannes Film Festival Kicks Off Amid France’s Pension Reform Protests
France has been rocked by successive nights of protests since Nahel was shot point-blank on Tuesday during a traffic stop captured on video.
In her first media interview since the shooting, Nahel’s mother, Mounia, told the France 5 channel: “I don’t blame the police, I blame one person: the one who took the life of my son.”
She said the 38-year-old officer responsible, who was detained and charged with voluntary manslaughter on Thursday, “saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life”.
The memorial march for Nahel, led by Mounia, ended with riot police firing tear gas as several cars were set alight in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the teenager lived and was killed.
As part of measures to restore calm, Paris bus and tram services were halted after 9:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Thursday, the region’s president said.
But the measures and heightened security appeared to do little to deter unrest Thursday night.
In the city centre of Marseille, a library was vandalized, according to local officials, and scuffles broke out nearby when police used tear gas to disperse a group of 100 to 150 people who allegedly tried to set up barricades.
