Riots reach French capital
Riots which have rocked France for the past 10 days reached central Paris for the first time today in an orgy of destruction and violence.
The crisis, which began as an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing projects, reached a new intensity with at least 900 cars torched across the country overnight, despite repeated calls for calm and massive policing to halt the unrest.
Police said 32 cars were set afire in Paris as the violence moved from poor suburbs into the capital for the first time.
Post offices, municipal buildings, provincial police stations and even nursery schools were targeted by arsonists to the north, south, east and west of Paris. Police made 186 arrests overnight nationwide.
The unrest is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society’s margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair.
France, with some five million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe.
The number of cars torched overnight – 1,295 across France – was the highest since the unrest began on October 27, France-Info radio and other French media reported.
Police say copycat attacks have fanned the unrest, but there was no evidence of co-ordination behind the spreading violence. Officials say the unrest appears to be orchestrated by older youths teaching younger teens ho to make petrol bombs and carry out arson attacks.
Police found a petrol bomb-making factory in an abandoned building in Evry, a southern Paris suburb that contained 150 explosives ready for se, more than 100 bottles, gallons of fuel and hoods for hiding rioters’ faces, said senior Justice Ministry official Jean-Marie Huet.
He said the discovery shows that petrol bombs being used by rioters “are not being improvised by kids in their bathrooms”, adding that police had arrested six youths, all under 18, in a raid on the factory late on Saturday.
Overnight attacks were reported in southern cities including the cultural bastion of Avignon and the resort cities of Nice and Cannes.
There were also attacks in or around the cities of Lyon, Lille, Marseille, Strasbourg and in the Normandy area.
Before the latest incidents, some 2,300 police poured into the Paris region to bolster security.
The violence began late last month in Clichy-sous-Bois, a low-income suburb northeast of Paris, after the deaths of two teenagers, of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin.
The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation. They apparently thought they were being chased.
Since then, the situation has calmed in Clichy-sous-Bois, where clashes between youths and police have stopped. But, anger and violence haws heightened in new areas.
The town of Evreux, 60 miles west of Paris, appeared hardest hit by marauding youths overnight, said Patrick Hamon, the national police spokesman. Arsonists there destroyed at least 50 vehicles, shops and businesses at a shopping centre, a post office and two schools, he said.
Five police officers and three firefighters were injured in clashes with youths in Evreux, Hamon said.
“Rioters attacked us with baseball bats,” said Philippe Jofres, a deputy fire chief from the area, told France-2 television. “We were attacked with pickaxes. It was war.”
For the second night in a row, a helicopter equipped with spotlights and video cameras to track bands of youths combed the poor, heavily immigrant Seine-Saint-Denis region, northeast of Paris, where the violence began and has been concentrated.
Dozens of vehicles, two gymnasiums and at least three classrooms were set afire in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, outside Paris, local officials said.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy – blamed for inflaming violence with tough talk and calling troublemakers “scum” – visited the hard-hit Essonne region early today to ”give police support,” he said.
