France erupted in violence for a second night Wednesday as security forces moved to prevent more protests over the fatal shooting of a teenager by police.
Around 2,000 riot police were initially deployed in suburbs around Paris after a 17-year-old was shot in the chest at point-blank range during a traffic stop on Tuesday morning.
France’s interior minister said a further 40,000 police officers will deployed overnight Thursday to squash any fresh outbreaks of violence.
The teenager’s mother called for a march on Thursday in tribute to her only child.
The death sparked clashes and arson attacks in several of the capital’s suburbs overnight and across the next 24 hours with 31 people arrested and 24 police officers injured, as Breitbart London reported.
AFP reports overnight on Wednesday, cars were set on fire and fireworks aimed at police in the western suburb of Nanterre, where the shooting took place, as well as other communes of the Hauts-de-Seine region to the west of Paris, and in the eastern city of Dijon.
In the Essonne region to the south of the capital, a group of people set a bus on fire after having all the passengers get off, police said.
In the southern city of Toulouse, several cars were torched and responding police and firefighters pelted with projectiles as thick black smoke billowed high into the sky, a police source told the outlet.
Protesters gather in front of Nantes’ Police Station during a rally against police violence and in solidarity with a teenager killed in Nanterre by police during a traffic stop, in Nantes on June 28, 2023. (SEBASTIEN SALOM-GOMIS/AFP via Getty Images)
This photograph shows cars burning during protests in Nanterre, west of Paris, on June 28, 2023, a day after the killing of a 17-year-old boy in Nanterre by a police officer’s gunshot following a refusal to comply. French security forces deployed in their thousands on the evening of June 28 amid fears of more violent protests over the fatal shooting. (GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP via Getty Images)
About 150 people have been arrested in total across the country, police said shortly after midnight.
The government on Wednesday issued a rare criticism of the security forces.
“A teenager was killed. That is inexplicable and unforgivable,” President Emmanuel Macron said during an official visit to Marseille, southern France.
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