Three days after the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a police officer near Paris, urban violence continues to shake France, particularly the Paris region, leaving the specter of a 2005-like general conflagration alive again come alive
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The drama, which caused the anger of the popular districts, happened on Tuesday around 8:00 a.m. in Nanterre when the police checked the car of 17-year-old Nahel.
The scene was captured on amateur video, widely shared on social media and authenticated by AFP.
It shows the National Police motorcyclist holding Nahel at gunpoint after a chase and then, positioned to the side of the vehicle, fired at point-blank range as the teenager drove off again. He died shortly thereafter.
Hours later, tensions erupt in this popular town in the western Paris suburbs, initially centered in the Pablo-Picasso neighborhood where the young man lived before spreading to other communities in the Ile-de-France ( Paris region).
Nahel’s death caused a great deal of excitement in France and sparked controversy over the use of arms by the police in the event of a refusal to comply.
The scenes of urban rioting over the last three nights, with burned vehicles, looted shops and derelict public buildings, are reminiscent of those that have erupted regularly for forty years, from Vaulx-en-Velin (central east of the country) to Villiers-le-Bel ( Paris area).
In July 1981, two months after Socialist President François Mitterrand came to power, the eastern suburbs of Lyon caught fire. In Minguettes in Vénissieux, Villeurbanne and Vaulx-en-Velin, young migrants hard hit by unemployment and racism burn down cars and turn themselves in to the police. This “hot summer” made headlines in the national press.
AFP
The following decade was also marked by outbreaks of violence, notably in Vaulx-en-Velin, triggered by the death of a motorcycle occupant who was hit by a police vehicle on October 6, 1990.
The memory of the three-week riots in 2005 has hung on everyone’s lips since Tuesday, when the suburbs of major cities burst into flames after the deaths of two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted in a transformer while attempting to escape. to the police of Clichy-sous-Bois, in Seine-Saint-Denis (Paris region), the poorest department in metropolitan France.
In 2005, right-wing President Jacques Chirac and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy declared a state of emergency, a first in mainland France since the Algerian war.
Demands emerged on Thursday from the right and far right to do the same, an option so far rejected by the executive branch, even as “all hypotheses” are “considered” in a bid to restore “order”, according to Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne .
AFP
President Emmanuel Macron on Friday announced the deployment of “additional resources” in the face of the unrest, in addition to the 40,000 police forces mobilized the previous day.
Nahel was born in 2006 and grew up alone with his mother. He was known for refusing to comply. The latter was the reason for his complaint to the public prosecutor’s office last Sunday, with the intention of being summoned before a juvenile court in September.
A “white march” in his memory on Thursday brought together several thousand people from his neighborhood to the place of his death.
AFP
“I’m not blaming the police, I’m blaming a person who took my son’s life,” the victim’s mother, Mounia M., said on France 5.
The police officer who admitted to being responsible for the fatal shooting is a 38-year-old motorcyclist.
He was charged by a public official on Thursday with first degree murder and – a rare occurrence in cases of this nature – was remanded in custody under prosecutor’s orders. The latter took the view that “the legal requirements for the use of the weapon” were “not met”.
AFP
The police officer’s lawyer, Me Laurent-Franck Liénard, will appeal against the pre-trial detention. His client was “devastated” and had “asked the Nahels family for forgiveness,” he assured.
“He is an experienced police brigadier who had the confidence of his superiors,” said Paris Police Prefect Laurent Nuñez.