The grandmother of a teenager in France who was shot to death by police has urged rioters to “stop” and not to use his death as an excuse for violence.
France has been rocked by successive nights of protests and riots after 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was shot dead by police on Tuesday.
Some 719 people were arrested on Saturday night amid demonstrations and riots, with the violence including the home of a Paris suburb mayor being ram-raided and set alight while his wife and children were asleep.
Nahel’s grandmother Nadia told French broadcaster BFM TV: “Fortunately the police are here. The people who are destroying, I tell them to ‘stop’. They are using Nahel as an excuse.
“They need to stop breaking the windows, the buses, the schools. We want things to calm down. We don’t want them to destroy.
“I am tired, I can’t take it anymore, I can’t sleep, I turned off the TV, I turned everything off I don’t want to listen to this anymore.”
Another relative, speaking to the BBC on condition of anonymity, said that they had “never called for hate or riots”.
“We didn’t ask to break or steal. All of this is not for Nahel,” said the relative, instead saying they had urged marches “without outbursts”.
Family of the 17-year-old boy have called for the law to be reviewed in France which allows police to use lethal force if a young person refuses to stop at a traffic stop.
Some 2,400 people have been detained since Tuesday after the shooting in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.
French president Emmanuel Macron was due to hold a meeting with the prime minister Elisabeth Borne, interior minister Gerald Darmanin and justice minister Eric Dupond-Moretti on Sunday evening to discuss the violence.
Earlier, Vincent Jeanbrun, mayor of the southern suburb of L’Hay-les-Roses, said his wife and one of their two children, aged five and seven, were injured as they fled their home in the early hours of Sunday morning when it was set upon by rioters.
In a statement on Twitter, he said: “A milestone was reached in horror and ignominy. My home was attacked and my family was the victim of an assassination attempt.”
The local prosecutor told reporters that an investigation into attempted murder had been opened. No suspects have been arrested.
Several schools, police stations, town halls and stores have also been targeted by fires or vandalism in recent days.
