Degraded public buildings, looted stores, burned vehicles… Many cities in the Paris region and in the provinces are waking up, this Friday, June 30, 2023, with the scars of a new night of violence, the third since the death Tuesday in Nanterre of Nahel, killed by a policeman.
During the night from Thursday to Friday, the police carried out 667 arrests, announced Gérald Darmanin. To stem a “generalization” of urban violence, the authorities had mobilized 40,000 police and gendarmes, as well as elite intervention units such as the Raid (police) or the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN). Despite this massive deployment, violence and degradation took place in multiple cities.
Brest, Lille, Marseilles…
This was the case in the heart of Paris, at Les Halles and in the rue de Rivoli which leads to the Louvre, but also in the Parisian suburbs, in the urban area of Rouen, in Nantes and in Brest. In Seine-Saint-Denis, “virtually all municipalities” have been impacted. Many supermarkets were looted, particularly in Montreuil and Épinay-sur-Seine. In Drancy, rioters used a truck to force entry into a shopping center which was partially looted and burned.
Garbage cans, cars and buses were burned, especially in Villeurbanne (Rhône) or Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis). Public buildings have been targeted by groups often hooded or hidden under hoods, such as the town hall of the priority district of Argon in Orléans.
The police office located at the Laherrère pole in Pau, for example, was targeted by a molotov cocktail. In Lille (north), the town hall of a working-class district in the south was set on fire and another, in the east of the city, was stoned. The fires multiplied in Roubaix, under the sirens of the firefighters and the searchlight of a police helicopter.
In the city center of Marseille, it is the storefront of the municipal library of the Alcazar which was damaged. A short distance away, on the Old Port, scuffles pitted the police against a group of 100 to 150 people who allegedly tried to set up barricades.
The Pablo Picasso housing estate in Nanterre, where Nahel was from, experienced a third night of sustained violence with burned cars, firework mortars and homemade grenades. A Crédit Mutuel bank branch was set on fire.
For the second time in two days, President Emmanuel Macron will chair a new interministerial crisis unit at 1 p.m. in Paris.