A burned down town hall in the neighborhood, another stoned to death, looting and humiliation: In Lille, in northern France, a cat-and-mouse game between scattered small groups and a large police presence began overnight from Thursday to Friday.
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As in other French cities, there has been violence in the metropolis of 1.5 million inhabitants near the Belgian border since a teenager was killed in Nanterre near Paris on Tuesday, who was killed by a police officer after refusing.
In the popular district of Wazemmes, after midnight, firefighters finish putting out a blaze that has damaged the ground floor of the district town hall.
The facade has been blackened and the police are blocking the place, AFP journalists note.
“Burning down a town hall is pointless,” says Sofiane, 22, a bus driver, in front of the building while firecrackers ring out in the distance.
“The cop who did it didn’t have to do it,” he stresses of the cop who shot dead 17-year-old Nahel in Nanterre, “but attacking public places is useful, what has it got nothing to do with it.”
“It’s unacceptable,” it “affects the population,” said Brice Lauret, District Councillor, who rushed to the scene. “I can understand anger, but not violence,” he adds.
In another popular area, in Fives, stones were thrown at the district town hall and its windows were broken, Lille town hall said.
And there is “a lot of looting” of shops and supermarkets, we complain. The fact that there are “very mobile small groups, made up of very young” individuals who are striking “everywhere”.
AFP
However, the metropolis is occupied by key police forces, including elite units from the RAID, and has been overflown by a gendarmerie helicopter and police drones following last night’s violence.
Tension also rises after midnight in Roubaix, one of the communes in the agglomeration and one of the poorest in France. There the police are blocking access to a theater whose windows have been broken several times.
Debris from barricades continues to burn next to the building. The sky is covered with fireworks.
The first incidents took place in the metropolis around 9 p.m. (7 p.m. GMT) in the area of the central police station in Lille, where the prefecture had banned all gatherings after calling for a rally on social networks.
AFP
Mobile and scattered small groups of young people set fire to garbage cans and cars and vandalized shop windows on a main thoroughfare. Some have smashed the windows of a supermarket only to come out with bottles of soda.
Aboard an ATV and an armored vehicle, RAID police officers intervened several times to push them back by aiming rocket launchers in their direction.
“They don’t give gifts, today they shoot,” commented a passerby who, like everyone else interviewed by AFP, refused to identify themselves.
The prefecture announced six arrests in the sector, out of a total of 24 identified by a metropolitan-wide police source earlier in the evening.
These first troublemakers were defying a 6 p.m. ban on gatherings in the sector imposed by the prefecture after the violence that shook Lille and its suburbs on Wednesday night and a call for a militant rally on social networks.
“The police feel allowed, they have killed an innocent young man, they have to stop,” said another 16-year-old passerby.
AFP
“Nahel’s death is too serious, it’s unjustified,” says a young man in his 20s nearby, “but the reaction is bad, the degradation of public services is useless,” or something like “It’s our money, that that will fix everything”.