Paris rocked by unrest

2005-11-01 07:45

Clichy-Sous-Bois - Police fired tear gas and rioters hurled Molotov cocktails as violence hit a poor Paris suburb for the fifth straight night in unrest that officials said on Tuesday had also spread to neighbouring towns.

The local prefecture said that the levels of violence in the troubled suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois were lower than on previous nights.

However 12 people were arrested in the town, which has a large Muslim community, during a night in which a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a police station and 11 cars and trash cans were torched.

Tensions have been running high between police and gangs of youths in Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast of the capital, since the accidental death by electrocution last Thursday of two teenagers.

Unrest is spreading

Many of the youths targeting police were angry at the deaths of two youths, aged 15 and 19, who were electrocuted after they scaled the wall of an electrical relay station and touched a transformer.

The local public prosecutor, Francois Molins, said the boys thought they were being chased by police, but authorities denied that was the case.

The launching of a tear gas grenade at a mosque late on Sunday threatened to further escalate the troubles.

Police fired more tear gas overnight on Monday to disperse around 100 youths involved in a stand-off with some 50 officers near the mosque.

The area was quiet by 01:00.

In another worrying development, Monday night was the first time that the unrest was reported to have spread to neighbouring areas of the Seine-Saint-Denis region abutting Paris.

Just after midnight in nearby Montfermeil, the municipal police garage was set ablaze and two cars destroyed, a prefecture spokesperson said.

Elsewhere in the towns of Sevran and Aulnay-sous-Bois police were subjected to "stone-throwing" gangs but there were no injuries, according to the local prefecture. Small fires were also lit in the towns.

One police source told AFP that "the Clichy rioters are being copied in Sevran, Neuilly-sur-Marne and Bondy", where he said vehicles were torched.

However the prefecture described the latest trouble as "harassment" by small groups of 10 or 15 people rather than the "rioting" seen last week.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy - who has implemented hardline urban security policies in his bid to be a conservative candidate in France's 2007 presidential elections - visited the administrative headquarters responsible for the suburb.

Asked about the tear gas grenade at the mosque, he admitted that it was of the type used by anti-riot police but cautioned "that does not mean that it was fired by a police officer."

Among those detained since Thursday were four minors, who were to be brought before a children's court judge on Tuesday.

Another magistrate on Monday ordered three young men to jail for two months.

- AFP