Youths Burn Hundreds of Cars in France
Pastor Dale Morgan
Oct 29, 8:39 PM EDT
*
Youths Burn Hundreds of Cars in France*
By ELAINE GANLEY
Associated Press Writer
CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France (AP) -- Marauding youths torched hundreds of
vehicles overnight and on Saturday in renewed violence coinciding with
the first anniversary of riots that exposed a deep schism between poor
North African immigrants and mainstream France.
A group of teenagers set one bus on fire Saturday in the southern French
port city of Marseille, seriously wounding a passenger. Three others
suffered from smoke inhalation, police said. Two other public buses and
277 vehicles around the country were burned overnight, police said.
Six police were injured and 47 people were arrested, ministry officials
said. Still the Interior Ministry described the night as "relative
calm," noting that up to 100 cars are torched by youths in troubled
neighborhoods on an average night.
Police had braced for a bigger replay of violence in the poor suburbs
predominantly made up of Muslims from former French colonies in Africa.
Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the deaths of two teens that
ignited three weeks of riots in 2005.
The rioting was fueled by anger at France's failure to offer equal
opportunities to many minorities - especially Arabs and blacks - and
France's 5 million-strong Muslim population.
France's trouble integrating minorities and the suburban unrest are
becoming hot political issues in the campaign for next year's
presidential and parliamentary elections. The government passed an equal
opportunities law this spring and has poured funds into "sensitive"
areas, but disenchantment is still pervasive.
The latest unrest centered on the troubled suburbs that ring Paris. Half
the cars burned nationwide overnight were torched in the region around
the capital. Of the 47 arrests, 33 people were taken into custody in the
Paris suburbs, mostly for throwing projectiles, burning cars or
generally vandalizing property, police said.
The national police said about 4,000 extra police and riot officers were
deployed across the country to cope with a possible resurgence of
violence. Some 7,000 police are at the ready on an average night in
France, officials have said.
The bus attacks late Friday were not far from the site where the two
teens were electrocuted in a power substation in Paris suburb
Clichy-sous-Bois on Oct. 27, 2005. The two were hiding after what they
thought was a police chase.
One bus was engulfed in flames at the foot of a high-rise housing project.
"Four guys attacked Bus 346," said witness Thierry Ange, 19. "They made
everyone get off, then they hit a woman and dragged out the bus driver
by his tie," then torched the bus with a gasoline bomb in a bottle, he said.
The blackened remains of another bus burned earlier stood across town.
Two armed men had forced passengers off the bus, police said.
Youths also tried to burn a bus in Reims in eastern France, and
attackers hurled metal balls at an empty bus in Trappes, west of Paris,
the Interior Ministry said.
Scores of police, wielding shields and backed by a helicopter shining
its searchlight, swept into a tough housing project in Montfermeil, a
town near Clichy-sous-Bois, and several youths responded by throwing stones.
Paris' transport authority responded to the violence by curtailing bus
services in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of the capital, which is
home to thousands of immigrants and their French-born children.
---
Associated Press writers Jean-Marie Godard and Jean-Pierre Verges
contributed to this report from Paris.