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Paris riots gain dangerous momentum
(AP)
Updated: 2005-11-04 10:46 A week of riots in poor
neighborhoods outside Paris gained dangerous new momentum Thursday, with youths
shooting at police and firefighters and attacking trains and symbols of the
French state.
Facing mounting criticism, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin vowed to
restore order as the violence that erupted Oct. 27 spread to at least 20 towns,
highlighting the frustration simmering in housing projects that are home to many
North African immigrants.
Police deployed for a feared eighth night of clashes, after bands of youths
lobbing stones and petrol bombs ignored President Jacques Chirac's appeal for
calm a day earlier.
"I will not accept organized gangs making the law in some neighborhoods. I
will not accept having crime networks and drug trafficking profiting from
disorder," Villepin said at the Senate in between emergency meetings called over
the riots.
The streets were relatively calm early Friday, but dozens of firefighters
battled a warehouse blaze in Aulnay-sous-Boisy.
The unrest cast a cloud over the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In
Clichy-sous-Bois — heart of the rioting — men filled the Bilal mosque for
evening prayers, but streets were subdued with shops shutting early.
"Look around you. How do you think we can celebrate?" said Abdallah Hammo as
he closed the tea house where he works.
Riots erupted in an outburst of anger in Clichy-sous-Bois over the accidental
electrocution Oct. 27 of two teenagers who fled a soccer game and hid in a power
substation when they saw police enter the area. Youths in the neighborhood
suspect that police chased Traore Bouna, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, to their
deaths.
Since then riots have swelled into a broader challenge against the French
state and its security forces. The violence has exposed deep discontent in
neighborhoods where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children
are trapped by poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, crime, poor
education and housing.
The Interior Ministry released a preliminary report Thursday exonerating
officers of any direct role in the teenagers' deaths. Some 1,300 officers were
being deployed in Seine-Saint-Denis, a tough northeastern area that includes the
town of Clichy-sous-Bois and has seen the worst violence.
The report said police went to Clichy-sous-Bois to investigate a suspected
intrusion on a building site but did not chase the teenagers who were killed. A
third teenager who was seriously injured also told investigators he and the
other boys were aware of the dangers when they hid in the substation, which was
fenced off, the report said.
The report did not address why the youths ran when officers came to the
neighborhood, but it said Benna was known to police for having committed robbery
with violence and Bouna was among those who had intruded onto the building site.
His father, Amor Benna, told The Associated Press that he and the other
teenagers' families have filed a legal complaint to try to determine whether "a
mistake was made by security forces. We want to know the circumstances that led
to his death."
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