More than 1,300 people were arrested in a fourth night of violence in France after the police shooting of a 17-year-old boy.
Forty-five thousand police officers, including special forces, were deployed to respond to rioting across the country on Friday night, with the situation in two big cities – Marseille and Lyon – highlighted as particularly chaotic, with buildings and vehicles torched and stores looted.
The ministry of the interior reported that 1,311 people were arrested overnight, while 79 police officers and gendarmes were injured and 2,500 fires were recorded.
The unrest flared nationwide after Nahel M, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was shot by police on Tuesday during a traffic stop in a Paris suburb. His death, caught on video, has reignited longstanding complaints of police violence and racism.
The 38-year-old officer involved in the shooting, who has said he fired the shot because he feared he and his colleague or someone else could be hit by the car, has been charged with voluntary homicide and placed in provisional detention.
The funeral ceremony for Nahel began on Saturday with a visitation, and will be followed by a mosque ceremony and burial in a cemetery in Nanterre.
The ministry said the protests were “of a lower intensity compared with the previous night”.
“It’s the republic that will win, not the rioters,” France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said as he met police in the early hours of Saturday morning. He denounced the “unacceptable violence in Lyon and Marseille”, where public demonstrations were banned and public transport halted.
There more than 400 arrests in the capital, with reports of burnt rubbish and violent scuffles in the Les Halles district.
More than 80 arrests were made in Marseille, according to the interior ministry, and “significant reinforcements” were sent after the mayor, Benoît Payan, called on the national government to immediately send additional troops.
“The scenes of pillaging and violence are unacceptable,” Payan tweeted late on Friday, after police clashed with protesters.
Local media reported that an Aldi was the target of a looting ram-raid, while authorities said they were investigating the cause of an apparent explosion in the city, which they did not believe caused any casualties.
Several rifles were looted from a gun store, but no ammunition was taken. One person was arrested with a rifle that was probably from the store, police said.
In Lyon and its surrounding suburbs, rioters set cars ablaze and aimed fireworks at police. Police deployed armoured personnel carriers and a helicopter to quell the unrest in France’s third-largest city.
Nanterre’s mayor, Patrick Jarry, said: “There’s a feeling of injustice in many residents’ minds, whether it’s about school achievement, getting a job, access to culture, housing and other life issues … I believe we are in that moment when we need to face the urgency [of the situation].”
Speaking in Mantes-la-Jolie, Darmanin highlighted the young age of many of those taking part in demonstrations.
“I do not confuse the few hundred, the few thousand delinquents, often very young unfortunately, with the vast majority of our compatriots who live in working-class neighbourhoods, who want to work and educate their children,” he said.
The French football team urged an end to the violence on Friday night.
“The time of violence must give way to that of mourning, dialogue and reconstruction,” the team said in a statement posted on social media by their captain, Kylian Mbappé.
The team said they were “shocked by the brutal death of young Nahel” but asked that violence give way to “other peaceful and constructive ways of expressing oneself”.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, left an EU summit in Brussels early on Friday to attend a crisis meeting. He urged parents to keep their children at home and accused social media companies of playing a “considerable role”, saying violence was being organised online. He asked platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok to remove sensitive content.
Macron is under mounting pressure from rightwing parties to declare a state of emergency, which would give authorities extra powers to ban demonstrations and limit free movement.
Asked on Friday night whether the government could declare a state of emergency, Darmanin said: “We’re not ruling out any hypothesis and we’ll see after tonight what the president of the republic chooses.”
Darmanin said on Saturday he was cautious about such an order, which “has been called four times in 60 years”.
Analysts said the government was desperate to avoid a repeat of 2005, when a state of emergency was declared after the death of two boys of African origin in a police chase sparked three weeks of rioting.
Reuters contributed to this report
