French courier Chronopost has announced that it will not deliver any packages to the heavily migrant-populated Seine-Saint-Denis suburb on the outskirts of Paris because the area is too dangerous.
The company announced the measures last week saying that residents of the Paris suburb will have to travel to pick up locations to get their packages. They said that the danger to their delivery drivers was simply too high in the area which has been described as a no-go zone, radio broadcaster France Info reports.
Though Chronopost has refused to deliver to certain neighbourhoods it has deemed to be too dangerous since last year, this is the first time an entire district has been designated as off-limits.
Last year, 51 of its delivery drivers were attacked while doing their rounds. The number of violent robberies in the Île-de-France region, where Seine-Saint-Denis is located, has risen by 40 per cent in the last two years alone. Across France, the number has increased by 60 per cent.
Laurent Russier, Communist Party mayor of Saint-Denis, expressed outrage at the company’s decision: “It is totally abnormal that a part of the city so small is no longer delivered to by what I continue to consider as a public service.”
Chronopost is a subsidiary of La Poste, which is 73.7 per cent owned by the French government.
“The disappearance of public services leads to insecurity,” Russie added.
Postal workers are not the only ones who have been attacked in the troubled Paris suburbs. Earlier this year, police were attacked in the area during riots following allegations that officers sexually assaulted a local man with a truncheon.
In July, around 900 cars were burned and one officer severely attacked in the area during a visit by U.S. President Donald Trump who attended the annual Bastille Day celebrations.
Seine-Saint-Denis has also been tied to radical Islamism and Islamic terrorism. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron admitted that the Paris suburbs had become havens for Islamism and vowed to tackle the issue.
“Radicalisation has taken hold because the French Republic has given up,” Macron said and added: “And we allowed, in too many cities, too many districts, representatives of a distortion of a religion who are full of hate and disenfranchisement to provide solutions that the Republic no longer gives.”