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Unrest crawls across France
05/11/2005 12:12 - (SA)
Aubervilliers - Bands of youths torched more than 350 cars and burned warehouses and a nursery school in a ninth night of violence that fanned out from the restive Paris suburbs to towns around France, police said on Saturday. Authorities appealed for calm in the face of an unprecedented streak of urban unrest in France.
Troublemakers fired bullets into a vandalised bus, set a warehouse ablaze, burned 44 cars in a lot in Suresnes, just west of Paris, and, in a malevolent turn, stoned rescuers aiding someone who had fallen ill and torched the ambulance, police said.
Incidents, mainly fires, were reported in the northern city of Lille, in Toulouse, in the southwest, Rouen, in the west and elsewhere - the second night that the unrest spread beyond metropolitan Paris. An incendiary device was tossed at the wall of a synagogue in Pierrefitte, northwest of Paris, where electricity went out after a burning car damaged an electrical pole.
Appeal for calm
"This is dreadful, unfortunate. Who did this? Against whom?" said Naima Mouis, 43, a hospital worker in Suresnes looking at the hulk of her burned-out car.
An Interior Ministry operations centre tracking the destruction reported about 355 vehicles burned around France - one-third outside the Paris region. The figure - not definitive - marked a drop from the more than 500 vehicles set ablaze 24 hours earlier. However arrests were up, to about 170, the centre said.
A full picture of the night's violence was not expected until later on Saturday.
Officials in the Yvelines region west of Paris said at least 60 vehicles were torched and a nursery school was all but burned to the ground.
About 30 mayors from the Seine-Saint-Denis region where the unrest started October 27 met on Friday to issue a joint appeal for calm. Claude Pernes, mayor of Rosny-sous-Bois, denounced a "veritable guerrilla situation, urban insurrection" that has taken hold. Marches to call for calm were planned Saturday in several suburbs.
The violence - sparked after the October 27 accidental electrocution of two teenagers who believed police were chasing them in Seine-Saint-Denis - has laid bare discontent simmering in France's poor suburbs ringing big cities. Those areas are home to large populations of African Muslim immigrants and their children living in low-income housing projects marked by high unemployment, crime and despair.
The persistence of the violence prompted the American and Russian governments to advise citizens visiting Paris to steer clear of the suburbs, where authorities were struggling to gain control of the worst rioting in at least a decade.
The violence has alarmed the government of President Jacques Chirac, whose calls for calm have gone unheeded.
"This is the first time (suburban violence) has lasted so long, and the government appears taken aback at the magnitude," said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Centre for Study of French Political Life.
- AP
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