875 arrested in France overnight after protests over fatal police shooting
A total of 875 people were arrested in the third night of unrest in France as protests swept the country following the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy, BFMTV reported on Friday.
French President Emmanuel Macron held a new crisis meeting of ministers on Friday and said that “additional means” would be mobilized by the Interior Ministry to deal with the violent protests, denouncing the “unacceptable exploitation of a death of an adolescent.”
Violence flared in Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse and Lille, as well as parts of Paris, including the working-class suburb of Nanterre, where 17-year-old Nahel M., who was of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was shot dead on Tuesday.
The police officer who fired his gun later told investigators that he had acted out of fear of the car causing a fatal accident.
According to authorities, some 40,000 police forces were deployed on Thursday nationwide to maintain order, including 5,000 in Paris.
Although Valerie Pecresse, president of the Ile-de-France region, announced on Thursday that buses and tramways would not be running in the region Thursday night after 9 p.m. local time, rioters still burned 12 buses in a bus center in Aubervilliers, a suburb north of Paris.