Cops faulted for Paris riots
2006-12-07 22:58
Paris - A French police report confirmed
officers chased a group of youths in a poor Paris suburb last
year, leading to the deaths of two of them and sparking weeks of
rioting.
The report by the inspection generale des services - the
police watchdog - was leaked to the daily Le Monde newspaper on
Thursday.
It concluded that officers had chased the youths and
had shown "surprising irresponsibility and carelessness".
In October 2005 three teenagers in the suburb of
Clichy-sous-Bois fled police before taking refuge in an
electricity sub-station, where two of them were electrocuted.
Officers denied chasing the boys. However, their families
claimed they were chased by police into the sub-station run by
electricity supplier EDF.
Thousands of cars burnt
The deaths set off angry protests and weeks of riots by
stone-throwing youths who torched thousands of cars, horrifying
France and laying bare the tensions in the poor, heavily
immigrant suburbs outside its prosperous town centres.
Partly based on evidence from radio traffic, the police
report concluded officers had pursued the three youths whom they
suspected of trying to break into a building site.
During the pursuit, it found that one of the officers had
seen them climb into the nearby sub-station and said: "If they
get into the EDF site, I don't give much for their hides."
The officer later denied to investigators that he had seen
them enter the facility.
According to Le Monde, the report, which was handed over to
the magistrate examining charges of "failure to provide
assistance to a person in danger", gave no opinion on the guilt
or otherwise of five officers questioned as witnesses.