As urban unrest spread to neighbouring Belgium and possibly Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm.
On Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for overnight arson and violence since rioting started on 27 October, Michel Gaudin told a news conference.
Travel warning
Australia, Austria, Britain, Germany and Hungary advised
their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the
United States and Russia in warning tourists to stay away
from violence-hit areas.
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Sarkozy sparked anger when he
described rioters as scum |
Alain Rahmouni, a national police spokesman, said a man
who was beaten died at a hospital from injuries sustained
in the attack, but he had no immediate details of the
victim's age or his attacker.
The man was caught by surprise after
rushing out of his apartment building to put out a
fire in a rubbish bin, Rahmouni said.
Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the
first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels' main
train station, police in the Belgian capital said.
Nationwide unrest
The mayhem started as an outburst of anger in suburban
Paris housing projects and has fanned out nationwide among
disaffected youths, mostly of Muslim or African origin, to
become France's worst civil unrest in more than a decade.
Attacks overnight on Sunday to Monday were reported in 274
towns, and police made 395 arrests, Gaudin said.
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On Sunday night a total of 1400
vehicles were burned |
"This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across
the country, shows up in the number of towns affected,"
Gaudin said, noting that the violence appeared to be
sliding away from its flashpoint in the Parisian suburbs
and worsening elsewhere.
It was the first time police had been injured by weapons'
fire and there were signs that rioters were deliberately
seeking out clashes with police, officials said.
Among the injured police, 10 were hurt by youths firing
fine-grain birdshot in a late-night clash in the southern
Paris suburb of Grigny, national police spokesman Patrick
Hamon said. Two were hospitalised, but their lives were not
considered in danger. One was wounded in the neck, the
other in the legs.
Racism and poverty
The unrest began on 27 October in the low-income Paris suburb of
Clichy-sous-Bois, after the deaths of two teenagers of
Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The youths were
accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a
power substation.
They apparently thought they were being
chased.
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President Jacques Chirac (R)
vowed to get tough on the rioters |
All told, 4700 cars have been burned in France since the
rioting began and 1200 suspects have been detained, at least
temporarily, Gaudin said.
The growing violence is forcing France to confront
long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans
and their French-born children live on society's margins,
struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination
and despair - fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as
well as for Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a
way out.
France, with 5 million Muslims, has the largest
Muslim population in Western Europe.
Fatwa against violence
President Jacques Chirac, whose government is under
intense pressure to halt the violence, promised stern
punishment for those behind the attacks, making his first
public comments on Sunday since the riots started.
"The law must have the last word," Chirac said on Sunday
after a security meeting with top ministers. France is
determined "to be stronger than those who want to sow
violence or fear, and they will be arrested, judged and
punished".
One of France's Muslim organisations, the
Union for Islamic Organisations of France, issued a fatwa (
religious decree). It forbade all those "who seek divine
grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes
private or public property or can harm others".
Arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city
of Saint-Etienne and its suburbs, and two people were
injured in the bus attack. Churches were set ablaze in
northern Lens and southern Sete, he said.
In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with
rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a
head injury, Hamon said, while a daycare centre was burned
in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb.
Much of the youths' anger has focused on law-and-order
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose reference to the
troublemakers as "scum" appeared to inflame passions.