France riots: Government orders buses and trams to stop services by sunset
Emmanuel Macron holds crisis talks after the third night of protests, as ITV News' Martha Fairlie and Europe Editor James Mates report
France’s interior ministry ordered the complete shutdown of all public bus and tram services by sunset, as the government combats rioting triggered by the deadly police shooting of a teenage boy.
The ministry said Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin issued the order after attending a crisis meeting Friday led by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Mr Darmanin instructed regional prefects who are under his command to shut down bus and tram services at 9 pm Friday, before it gets dark, everywhere across France, the ministry said. The Paris region had already announced such a shutdown to protect transport workers and passengers.It comes as the French leader blamed TikTok for fueling violence which has caused devastation across the country over the past three nights.
Protests erupted on Wednesday night after a police officer shot dead a 17-year-old delivery driver in the Parisian suburb on Nanterre.
Mr Macron is urging parents to keep teenagers at home to stop rioting spreading across the country.
Macron said social media is playing a “considerable role” in spreading unrest, after a second crisis meeting with senior ministers on Friday.
He said sites such as Snapchat and TikTok should remove sensitive content and said violence is being organised online.
Mr Macron said a third of the people arrested on Thursday night were “young people, sometimes very young," and that “it's the parents' responsibility” to keep their children at home.
“We sometimes have the feeling that some of them are living in the streets (of) the video games that have intoxicated them,” he said in relation to the young rioters.
All bus and tram services have been suspended for passengers' safety.
Barricades and fires filled the streets of some French cities once again last night as tensions mounted over the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old.
Protesters clashed with police for a third night, leaving around 200 officers injured and 875 people under arrest. No information was available about injuries among the rest of the population.
France's Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin tweeted on Friday morning: "Our police, gendarmes and firefighters courageously faced rare violence."
Striking footage shows a crane on fire amid the protests (credit: @relainfos)
The teenager identified by his first name, Nahel, was shot and killed by police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Wednesday.
The police officer accused of pulling the trigger has been handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache concluded “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.”
Preliminary charges mean investigating judges strongly suspect wrongdoing but need to investigate more before sending a case to trial.
The officer is sorry and "devastated," his lawyer told French TV channel BFMTV on Thursday.
"He doesn’t get up in the morning to kill people," the lawyer said of the officer, whose name has not been released as per French practice in criminal cases.
"He really didn’t want to kill."
France has deployed 40,000 police officers over fears of continued rioting after a teenage boy was shot dead, James Mates reports
Armoured police vehicles rammed through the charred remains of cars that had been flipped and set ablaze in the northwestern Paris suburb of Nanterre overnight.
On the other side of Paris, protesters lit a fire at the city hall of the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The French capital also saw garbage bins set ablaze and some store windows smashed.
In the port city of Marseille, police sought to disperse violent groups in the city center, regional authorities said.
Schools, town halls and police stations were targeted by people setting fires, and police used tear gas, water cannons and dispersion grenades against rioters, the spokesperson said.
"The professionals of disorder must go home," Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said.
While he said there’s no need yet to declare a state of emergency — a measure taken to quell weeks of rioting that followed the accidental death of two boys fleeing police in 2005 — he added: “The state’s response will be extremely firm.”
President Emmanuel Macron left early from an EU summit in Brussels, where France plays a major role in European policymaking, to return to Paris and hold an emergency security meeting Friday.
The German government on Friday said it's monitoring the unrest in France “with some concern” but that it was up to French authorities and the public there to tackle the issue.
But France's leader did find the time to enjoy an Elton John concert with his wife on Wednesday.
It sparked criticism from many social media users. One commented, "France is burning and the President of France is going to the Elton John concert" on an image shared by the star's husband David Furnish.
A video of him dancing in the crowds has also been widely shared on social media.
The shooting, captured on video, has shocked France and stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people.
Nahel's family and their lawyers haven’t said the police shooting was race-related and they didn’t release his surname or details about him.
The teenager will be buried Saturday, according to Nanterre Mayor Patrick Jarry, who said the country needs to “push for changes” in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Footage posted on social media shows police shooting at a car as it begins to speed off - the car is then filmed after it has crashed
Still, anti-racism activists renewed their complaints about police behavior.
“We have to go beyond saying that things need to calm down,” said Dominique Sopo, head of the campaign group SOS Racisme.
He said: “The issue here is how do we make it so that we have a police force that when they see Blacks and Arabs, don’t tend to shout at them, use racist terms against them and in some cases, shoot them in the head.”
In Nanterre, a peaceful march Thursday afternoon in honour of Nahel was followed by escalating confrontations, with smoke billowing from cars and garbage bins set ablaze.
Tensions rose in places across France throughout the day.
In the Pyrenees town of Pau in southwestern France, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a new police office, national police said. Vehicles were set on fire in Toulouse and a tramway train was torched in a suburb of Lyon, police said.
Paris police said its officers made 40 arrests, some on the margins of the largely peaceful memorial march for the teen and others elsewhere.
The fatal shooting also sparked unrest in Belgium on Thursday.
About a dozen people were arrested during scuffles in Brussels, according to police spokeswoman Ilse Van de Keere.
Prache, the Nanterre prosecutor, said officers tried to stop Nahel because he looked so young and was driving a Mercedes with Polish license plates in a bus lane.
He allegedly ran a red light to avoid being stopped then got stuck in traffic. Both officers involved said they drew their guns to prevent him from fleeing.
The officer who fired a single shot said he feared he and his colleague or someone else could be hit by the car, according to Prache.
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