Three days after the death near Paris of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a policeman, urban violence continues to agitate France, in particular the Paris region, reviving the specter of a general conflagration as in 2005.
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The drama at the origin of the anger of the popular districts occurred Tuesday around 08:00, in Nanterre, during a police check of the car driven by Nahel, 17 years old.
The scene was captured by an amateur video, widely shared on social networks and authenticated by AFP.
It shows that the national police motorcyclist held Nahel at gunpoint after a chase then, positioned on the side of the vehicle, fired at point-blank range when the teenager started up again. He died shortly thereafter.
Tensions erupt a few hours later in this popular city in the western suburbs of Paris, concentrating first in the Pablo-Picasso district where the young man lived, before spreading to other municipalities in Ile-de-France. (Parisian region).
Nahel’s death has created immense emotion in France and reignited the controversy over the use of weapons by the police in the event of refusal to comply.
The scenes of urban riots over the past three nights, with burned vehicles, looted stores and degraded public buildings, recall those that have broken out regularly for forty years, from Vaulx-en-Velin (center-east of the country) to Villiers-le -Bel (Paris region).
In July 1981, two months after Socialist President François Mitterrand came to power, the eastern suburbs of Lyon caught fire. In Minguettes in Vénissieux, Villeurbanne and Vaulx-en-Velin, young people from immigrant backgrounds, hit hard by unemployment and racism, burn cars and confront the police. This “hot summer” is making headlines in the national press.
AFP
The following decade was also marked by outbreaks of violence, and in particular that of Vaulx-en-Velin, triggered by the death on October 6, 1990 of the passenger of a motorcycle hit by a police vehicle.
Since Tuesday, the memory of the three weeks of riots in 2005 has been hovering in everyone’s mind, when the suburbs of large cities were inflamed after the death of two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, electrocuted in a transformer while trying to escape. to the police in Clichy-sous-Bois, in Seine-Saint-Denis (Paris region), the poorest department in metropolitan France.
In 2005, the right-wing president Jacques Chirac and his interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy declared a state of emergency, a first in mainland France since the Algerian war.
Calls to do the same were made on Thursday on the right and the far right, an option so far rejected by the executive even if “all hypotheses” are “considered” to restore “order” according to the Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
AFP
President Emmanuel Macron announced on Friday the deployment of “additional resources” in the face of the riots, in addition to the 40,000 members of the police mobilized the day before.
Born in 2006, Nahel was raised alone by his mother. He was known for acts of refusal to comply, the last having given rise to his presentation to the prosecution last Sunday, with a view to a summons in September before a juvenile court.
A “white march” in his memory brought together several thousand people on Thursday, from his neighborhood to the place of his death.
AFP
“I don’t blame the police, I blame a person, the one who took my son’s life,” said the victim’s mother, Mounia M., on France 5.
The police officer who admitted to being the author of the fatal shot is a 38-year-old motorcyclist.
He was charged on Thursday with intentional homicide by a person holding public authority and – a rare thing in this type of case – placed in pre-trial detention, in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution. The latter considered that “the legal conditions for the use of the weapon” were “not met”.
AFP
The policeman’s lawyer, Me Laurent-Franck Liénard, will appeal this placement in pre-trial detention. His client “is devastated” and asked “forgiveness to the family” of Nahel, he assured.
“He is a seasoned police brigadier, who had the confidence of his superiors”, underlined the prefect of police of Paris, Laurent Nuñez.