The mayor of a suburb of Paris said on Sunday that protesters had rammed a car into his home and then set the vehicle on fire, injuring his wife and one of his children, as violent demonstrations across France over the police killing of a 17-year-old stretched into a fifth night.
“Last night, a milestone was reached in terms of horror and ignominy,” the mayor, Vincent Jeanbrun, of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a town to the south of the capital, said in a statement on Twitter.
In a separate attack, the police said on Twitter that rioters had tried to set fire to a car belonging to another mayor, in the town of La Riche, near the city of Tours, southwest of Paris.
Across the rest of France, Saturday evening had generally been calmer than recent nights, during which hundreds of protests have taken place nationwide. But still, local news media reported rioting, looting and clashes in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, and hundreds more people were arrested.
Tensions remained high on Sunday after the funeral the day before for the 17-year-old, Nahel Merzouk. The teenager, of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was fatally shot on Tuesday during a traffic stop in Nanterre, a Paris suburb. Many protesters said that they saw themselves in the victim, connecting his fate with their own experiences of neglect and racial discrimination in France’s poorer urban suburbs.
Mr. Merzouk’s grandmother, who was identified by only her first name, Nadia, spoke to the French news channel BFMTV on Sunday and asked the rioters to stand down.
“People who are breaking things, I tell them, ‘Stop,’” she said, adding that they should refrain from smashing shop windows or targeting schools and buses.
“It’s moms who take buses,” she said.
In L’Haÿ-les-Roses, Mr. Jeanbrun said that he had been spending the night in the town hall, as he had been for the previous three nights, when a car was driven at his house at 1:30 a.m. while his wife and children were sleeping inside. His wife and one of his children were injured as they tried to run away, he said.
Stéphane Hardouin, the public prosecutor in Créteil, a town nearby, said that initial indications were that the car had crashed into the house with the intention of setting the building on fire, and he noted that some accelerant had been found in a bottle.
Mr. Hardouin said that a small wall had stopped the car before it reached the house’s veranda, and that only the front gate and the family’s car had been affected. Hearing the noise and seeing flames, the mayor’s wife and his children, ages 5 and 7, tried to flee through the back garden, but his wife injured herself, apparently breaking her shin, Mr. Hardouin added.
The French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, called the attack “cowardly and terrible,” and said in a post on Twitter that an attempted-murder investigation had been opened. “The perpetrators of these facts will answer for their heinous acts,” he wrote.
The French prime minister,…
2023-07-02 16:02:12
Post from www.nytimes.com
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