Tuesday 27 November 2007
Youths have fought running battles with French police in a second night of violence in Paris suburbs, leaving more than 60 police officers injured.
Five of the officers are said to be in a critical condition.
Rioting began in Villiers-le-Bel, on the northern edge of Paris, after two teenagers riding a motorbike died in a crash with a police car on Sunday.
The youths who died were of North African origin. Similar riots rocked mainly deprived French suburbs in 2005.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is currently in China, has appealed for calm.
Violence Escalates
The BBC's Alasdair Sandford in Paris says the violence was worse than on the first night.
Gangs of youths attacked police with petrol bombs and stones. Police say firearms were used against them, injuring several officers.
They responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.
The violence spread to five towns across the Val d'Oise department, north of Paris.
Cars were set on fire and two schools, a library and shops were badly damaged.
The French Interior Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, said she believed the trouble was organised.
The initial results of a police inquiry suggested that officers were not to blame for the two boys' deaths. The authorities say the motorbike crashed into a police patrol car at high speed.
A state prosecutor has ordered a manslaughter inquiry.
Simmering Discontent
The events have brought to the surface the simmering resentment and hatred among many young people in poor French suburbs towards the police, our correspondent says. Complaints of police harassment and discrimination are widespread in such areas, where many families are of African origin.
On Sunday, about 30 cars and several buildings, including a police station, were torched in Villiers-le-Bel and neighbouring Arnouville.
Twenty-six police and fire officers were injured and nine people were arrested then.
A state prosecutor has ordered the National Police General Inspectorate (IGPN) - an oversight body - to carry out a detailed inquiry into the circumstances in which the two teenagers - named only as Moushin, 15, and Larami, 16, lost their lives.
Police sources say that in Sunday's incident, the motorcycle was going at top speed, it was not registered for street use, the two teenagers were not wearing helmets and they ignored traffic rules.
The police car was on a routine patrol and the teenagers were not being chased by police at the time, officials said.
The prosecutor who has ordered the investigation, Marie-Therese de Givry, told LCI television that the teenagers had turned into the path of the police car.
She said the officers immediately called emergency services to the scene.
Two witnesses are said to have confirmed this, but the teenagers' relatives and other local residents say the police did nothing to help the dying teenagers.
President Sarkozy said he wanted "everyone to calm down and let the justice system decide who was responsible."
When he was interior minister in 2005, country-wide riots erupted after the electrocution of two teenagers in an electricity sub-station in the nearby suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. They were reported to have been fleeing police at the time.
Mr Sarkozy was heavily criticised two years ago after he called for crime-ridden neighbourhoods to be "cleaned with a power hose" and described violent elements as "gangrene" and "rabble".
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